From the Information Commissioner’s Office: The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined a private health company, HCA International Ltd, for failing to keep fertility patients’ personal information secure. The £200,000 monetary penalty has been issued as a result of an ICO investigation into the way the Lister Hospital was transferring, transcribing and storing records of IVF…
Month: February 2017
Data from connected CloudPets teddy bears leaked due to misconfigured database; 820,000 kids’ files exposed
Troy Hunt reports that a misconfigured MongoDB installation resulted in audio files of children’s and parents’ conversations recorded by CloudPets being exposed in a Shodan search. And as we’ve seen many other times, the exposed files were deleted by an attacker, and a purported “ransom” note left in place of the database – a ransom note that was…
Roxana Police Chief: System back online after ransomware attack
Alex B. Heeb reports: Police have finished cleaning up computer systems impacted by a ransomware virus earlier this month. […] But the town’s police capabilities were never impacted by the attack, Roxana Police Chief Will Cunningham said. Read more on Alton Telegraph, although they still don’t disclose what type of ransomware it was.
NC health department exposed patient information in email
Lynn Bonner reports: The state Department of Health and Human Services sent private patient information to adult care homes by unencrypted email last year. The security lapse involved 12,731 Medicaid patients living in adult care homes. On Nov. 30, an employee sent an unencrypted email that included patient names, Medicaid numbers, and the homes where…
Veterans Health Information Possibly Compromised
Dave Kibler reports: Riverbend veterans will soon know if any of their personal information was compromised in a release of information by a former Veteran’s Affair employee in St. Louis. A total of 724 patient’s records were released by the former employee to an employee not involved in the medical care of those veterans. The VA’s…
NHS accused of covering up huge data loss that put thousands at risk
Denis Campbell and Pamela Duncan report: Thousands of patients are feared to have been harmed after the NHS lost more than half a million pieces of confidential medical correspondence, including test results and treatment plans. In one of the biggest losses of sensitive clinical information in the NHS’s 69-year history, more than 500,000 pieces of patient data…