In November 2021, Valley Mountain Regional Center (VMRC) notified HHS that multiple employees were the victims of a phishing scheme that compromised the protected health information (PHI) of 17,197 individuals. They notified HHS, affected individuals, media, and provided substitute notice. HHS reports, “In its mitigation efforts, the Business Associate strengthened its technical safeguards to better protect PHI. OCR provided technical assistance to them.”
But in August 2023, when VMRC discovered another breach, they did not promptly notify HHS, regulators, or patients. DataBreaches’ worksheet for the month noted that the ransomware group known as Karakurt had added VMRC to their leak site in early August. But there was no disclosure by VMRC at the time or since then, it seems — until now.
VMRC Discloses the Breach
VMRC issued a press release yesterday. It claims that they first became aware of unusual activity in their network on August 1, 2023. They state, “The investigation subsequently revealed that certain personal information and personal health information was acquired without authorization on or about July 29, 2023. VMRC then engaged a third-party vendor to commence a review of the affected data to determine whether any sensitive data was involved and whether personal information may have been affected. On February 20, 2024, that review concluded and VMRC confirmed that certain personal information was involved. VMRC then took steps to notify impacted individuals of the incident as quickly as possible.”
The notice does not reveal that a ransomware gang was involved or whether they ever contacted the gang to find out what PHI the threat actors acquired.
The affected information may have included names, Social Security numbers, taxpayer identification numbers, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, usernames and passwords, biometric data, medical treatment and/or diagnosis information, and/or health insurance information. They add, “Please note that not all data elements were affected for all individuals.”
From July 2023 until now, patients were left in the dark while sensitive data was in the hands of criminals.
What We Don’t Know Yet
VMRC states, “VMRC is not aware of any evidence of the misuse of any information potentially involved in this incident.” They do not state what steps they have taken to search for evidence of the data on the dark web or any forums.
DataBreaches could not find the VMRC listing on Karakurt this morning, As a group, Karakurt has not been particularly consistent — they claim they will leak data and then never do in many cases. Did they lose access to their storage server? Do they still have VMRC data? DataBreaches submitted an inquiry to Karakurt via their leak site and will update this post if a reply is received.
DataBreaches also emailed questions to VMRC seeking additional details about the incident and their incident response. No reply has been received as yet.
VMRC’s report to HHS has yet to appear on HHS’s public breach tool, so we do not yet know the total number of patients affected.
Update: The incident was reported to HHS as impacting 126,679 patients. VMRC never replied to this site’s inquiries.