From an incident report appearing on Yale Medicine’s website:
Yale Medicine has discovered a cybersecurity incident, involving the records of patients seen by Dr. Tito Vasquez at his former practice, Connecticut Plastic Surgery Group LLC, between 2009 and May 2021. This notice concerns a data security event that may have resulted in unauthorized access to patient information.
As background, Yale Medicine acquired the private practice of Dr. Tito Vasquez in May 2021. All medical records after that date have been securely stored in Yale’s medical record system and were not affected by this incident. Before May 2021, Dr. Vasquez’s practice maintained a different medical record system on its own computer.
What Happened. On September 12, 2022, Yale Medicine learned that an unauthorized third party accessed a computer and installed malicious software that rendered files on the computer inaccessible. The unauthorized access to the computer began on or about August 11, 2022. Based on our cybersecurity investigation, we cannot rule out the possibility that, as a result of this incident, files containing some patient information may have been subject to unauthorized access.
Read more at Yale Medicine.
So was this an intended ransomware attack that succeeded in encrypting data? What happened after that? Was there a ransom demand? And what had Yale done with all of the doctor’s records and computers when they acquired his practice in 2021? Were the files and computers just treated as legacy data and left connected to the internet without updated security or….? Is there a backup of the data so that the doctor’s patient records prior to May 2021 are not totally lost due to being locked? There are questions that could use some answers.