The personal information of 640 staff and inpatients of Bokuto Hospital in Sumida Ward, Tokyo, was exposed on the Internet via Winny file-sharing software a male clerical employee used on his home computer, the Tokyo metropolitan government said.
The incident marked the first time the patient information of a metropolitan hospital was exposed on the Internet, the metropolitan government said Thursday.
About 271 of the people whose information was exposed are inpatients at the hospital, and many of them are patients of the orthopedics and dermatology departments.
The exposed inpatient information is from 2005 and 2006, the government said.
The 27-year-old male clerical employee responsible for the exposure was asked by a 42-year-old female nurse to recover personal data, which had been stored on a damaged USB flash drive, last summer. In the process of recovering the data, which included the names, ages and the ailments of former inpatients, he moved it to his home computer.
Source – Daily Yomiuri Online