On September 13, DataBreaches.net added an entry to the monthly worksheet this site maintains for annual data analyses. The entry was for “One Community Health” in Oregon, but it was not the covered entity that announced the breach. DataBreaches.net learned about the breach from Pysa threat actors who had added the covered entity to their leak site. Their entry noted that data had been exfiltrated on April 20.
The data dumped by Pysa is not reachable at this time, but the directory of files they claimed to have exfiltrated still appears on the leak site.
On November 22, One Community Health reported the incident to state attorneys general and posted a notice on their website. Given that a breach was first discovered on April 20, this appears well past the “no later than 60 days” notification provision of HITECH. To date, however, HHS does not seem to have taken any enforcement action or issued any monetary penalties for covered entities who disclose ransomware incidents more than 60 days from discovery that a breach occurred.
The notice states that patients’ social security numbers plus one or more of the following data types may have been exfiltrated: full name, date of birth, address and other demographic information, insurance information, diagnosis information, and/or treatment information.
The notice does not state how many patients were impacted by this incident, and the incident has not yet been posted on HHS’s public breach tool.
Nor does the notice inform patients that this was a ransomware incident and data were dumped on the dark web. The notice simply states that they have no evidence of any fraud arising from the incident, and some of those impacted were offered complimentary credit monitoring services.
As a result of the incident, One Community Health increased its cybersecurity defenses. They write:
As a result of this attack, we have partnered with cybersecurity experts to significantly increase our cybersecurity defenses to better protect our patients, our staff, and the services we provide our community. This includes: improved endpoint detection, 24×7 managed detection and response, and email and attachment security enhancements, in addition to other cybersecurity improvements.