The Pacific Pulmonary Medical Group (PPMG) in California has a significant data breach problem, but if you were to visit its website today, you’d have no clue that anything is amiss.
On October 25, Everest Team added PPMG to its dark web leak site. The unencrypted personal and protected health information that they subsequently dumped includes data from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. The data are in two formats: more than 150 image files, most of which contain the front and back of the patient’s primary and secondary insurance cards. Some files, however, contain images of patients’ driver’s licenses. Most of the files in the tranche, however, are .csv files, where each .csv file covers a two-week period that contains numerous fields with patient’s personal and protected health information.
The personal information includes but is not limited to the patient’s name, address, work and home phone numbers, cell numbers, Social Security numbers, date of birth, email addresses, smoking status, gender, race, ethnicity, and the name and information of their emergency contact person. The protected health information includes but is not limited to a patient ID number, the date of service, who checked them in, the purpose of the appointment, the name of the referring physician, the name of their primary care doctor, their health insurance account details, billing information, and more.
The most recent .csv file was for the period September 30 – October 6, but within that .csv, the most recent row was for October 4 data, suggesting that the data were exfiltrated on or about October 4 or before that two-week period’s records were fully entered.
Because patients may have been seen more than once in any two-week period over months and years, DataBreaches did not attempt to calculate the number of unique patients, but each two-week .csv appeared to have somewhere between 300 and 500 rows, where each row represented a patient visit record. There was only one .csv file for 2021, and it contained some protected health information for patients seen during the last quarter of 2021.
As of publication, there is no substitute notice on PPMG’s website, and no submission has appeared on HHS’s public breach tool.
DataBreaches sent PPMG an inquiry via its website earlier today and also emailed an inquiry to Everest. No replies have been received by publication.