On September 1, I reported that a breach disclosure by Hand Rehabilitation Specialists to the Vermont Attorney General’s Office was actually an incident that had involved TheDarkOverlord, a hacker or hacking collective who have been targeting the healthcare sector since last March or April. That notification did not name TheDarkOverlord as attackers. Nor did it mention any extortion attempt, but a spokesperson for TheDarkOverlord had been quite insistent with this site that not only had they hacked Hand Rehabilitation Specialists at some unknown point in time prior to July, but they had also attempted to extort them or hold the data for ransom. When they failed to get the desired response, they had contacted DataBreaches.net to reveal the hack, provide a sample of patient records. They claimed that their intention was to issue a press release and just dump the data.
But DataBreaches.net heard nothing further from The DarkOverlord after July 22, and they had declined to provide a larger data sample when I had trouble confirming the claimed hack, as I described here.
Now another victim of TheDarkOverlord has also disclosed that they were hacked. The incident is listed on HHS’s public breach tool as Adult Internal Medicine of North Scottsdale and affecting 11,798 patients. Because HHS does not provide additional coding for ransom or extortion, the incident is simply listed as a hacking /IT incident involving the network server, but this is highly likely to be the incident TheDarkOverlord told me about back in July. At the time, I had reached out to Dr. Jay Friedman’s office, but as with Hand Rehabilitation Specialists, did not get clear confirmation or TDO’s claims.
So although there does not appear to be any notice on the medical practice’s web site, it would appear that they knew about this breach back in July and are first disclosing it now.
By my count, there should be at least four more medical sector entities that should be disclosing hacks by TheDarkOverlord that were discovered in July. Whether they will disclose is another matter. Stay tuned.