One of the recurring themes in this site’s blog posts this year has been the fact that way too many entities not only store old data, but fail to secure it or protect it adequately from malware attacks or other attacks.
Today’s unhappy example comes to us from Apollo Career Center (“Apollo”), an adult education center in Ohio. According to their press release, they discovered that an unauthorized person had obtained access to their systems between May 5, 2021 and May 11, 2021, and had transferred some files outside of their network.
But then on September 8, their investigation revealed that
some information related to former adult education students enrolled at Apollo between 1957 and 2008 was contained in the files that may have been taken by the unauthorized person. The information in the files that may have been taken includes the former students’ names and Social Security numbers.
If the students were adults in 1957, many might be dead by now, but even so, the center needs to attempt to make notifications and offer mitigation services.
But how time-consuming and costly is this breach because old data was not segmented from the network and encrypted or properly secured?
DataBreaches.net is not recommending that regulators pile on, but maybe we do need more enforcement by the FTC and HHS on segmenting and protecting old data properly. Requiring data to be expired or deleted after a certain amount of time is one alternative, but it is generally not a desirable one in the healthcare sector where old medical records for a patient are sometimes really critical.