Deer Oaks Behavioral Health in Texas is a behavioral health services provider of psychological and psychiatric services to residents of long-term care and assisted living facilities. On October 31, they issued a substitute notice on their website about a ransomware incident they experienced.
According to their notice, they discovered the attack on September 1. “The unauthorized activity was immediately detected and isolated by Sophos antivirus software limiting the Incident to one segment of Deer Oaks’ network,” they wrote.
A forensics investigation and review of files was completed by September 29, and on October 31, they started sending out notification letters to the 171,871 people affected by the breach. Based on their review of data in the affected servers, the types of information potentially included client names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, diagnosis codes, insurance information, and treatment service types.
The Deer Oaks incident has not appeared on HHS’s public breach tool yet so we do not know if the number reported to Maine is for employees and clients/patients or just the clients or patients.
On or about September 11, LockBit3.0 added Deer Oaks to their leak site. On November 5, they claim to have leaked all the data that they described as “3 MS SQL Server databases with operations, clients, private data, finance data and transactions of Deer Oaks.” In the screenshot above, employee names, email addresses, phone numbers, and LinkedIn information have been redacted by DataBreaches.
As is often the case with LockBit3.0, however, the downloads fail, which may be saving employees and clients from their personal information becoming more widely available to the world. But will the downloads always continue to fail? And what else might happen to the data that can result in misuse?
Deer Oaks’ statement does not mention data being leaked on the dark web, so their clients may have no idea about this situation or possible increased risk to their privacy.