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HITRUST confirms a public server was hacked, but no sensitive data involved

Posted on May 28, 2013 by Dissent

Given how many claimed hacks are just — well, let’s just call them flat-out lies — more entities are starting to adopt a verify/confirm first before publishing approach.  Or they’re publishing and then trying to confirm – a less desirable approach, in my opinion.

Adopting the latter approach, Softpedia reached out to HITRUST after hackers claimed to have compromised and leaked data.

Following good transparency recommendations, HITRUST sent Softpedia the following statement:

“HITRUST had a non-critical, standalone public web server compromised by an SQL injection that resulted in some test data being leaked. The media article accurately claims that 111 records, including some real names, companies, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, as well as six encrypted passwords, were taken and compromised.

The database in question was a test database that was populated with information from rosters previously made public from planning meetings held during 2008, in addition to some factitious data created by our developers.

The user names and passwords mentioned were available only in the test database. The server did not contain any personal health or other sensitive information.

We sincerely regret any inconvenience this has created and take data security very seriously. It is our mission to protect information and do so in a manner that is appropriate and practical given the risks. We had not deemed this particular web server and test data to require higher assurances.

We have updated our policies both to non-critical, non-sensitive web servers and our test environments and will secure our test environments and public general information websites to a higher assurance level. The server in question has been addressed and test information deleted. None of our other servers or data centers were involved in this event.

HITRUST does maintain its operations in compliance with the CSF and utilizes CSF Certified environments.”

In this case, the hacker’s claims were verified, but the full details make the incident somewhat less cause for concern.

This incident, while not particularly serious by most standards these days, does provide a useful reminder that entities can still take a reputation/media hit when they use a layered approach to security and decide that protecting a particular database or server n is not particularly crucial or worth the investment of significant resources.  I think the incident also highlights the wisdom of reviewing what data are still being retained that might best be deleted if they are no longer needed.


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Category: Health Data

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