CorrectHealth in Georgia is a private provider of healthcare services to incarcerated individuals. In November 2021, they discovered a data breach involving some employees’ email accounts. They did not reveal when the breach occurred, and it seems it took them until July 2022 to investigate and identify the 54,066 individuals they are notifying. Nothing on their site indicates whether they are HIPAA-covered entities, subject to notification regulations.
According to CH’s website notification, the data types included name, address, Social Security number, Driver’s License number, passport number, financial account information, and/or limited medical information.
CH claims that although it has no reports of related identity theft since the date of the incident, they are notifying people “out of an abundance of caution and for purposes of full transparency.” Regular readers will know what DataBreaches thinks of such statements.
Criticisms aside for the moment, it was interesting to read the steps they have taken since the incident to improve their security:
CH issued a company-wide password reset for all employees, employed an advanced phishing service for CH’s email tenant, began putting disclaimers on all externally received emails, implemented Multi-Factor Authentication for all administrative staff, began rolling out a Single Sign On solution for clinical staff, and effected weekly data security and monthly simulated phishing training for all employees.
What a shame they hadn’t deployed some of that last year. Indeed the cost probably would have been cheaper than the costs of their incident response to the breach.