On November 3, 2024, WALB in Georgia reported that Memorial Hospital and Manor had been the victim of a ransomware attack on November 1 that they discovered on November 2. The hospital announced the incident on its Facebook page in a post that is no longer available.
But Memorial Hospital and Manor did not appear to have notified HHS of the breach at all — not even with a placeholder to indicate an unknown number of patients affected.
On February 8, the hospital notified the Maine Attorney General’s Office of the incident, reporting that a total of 120,085 people were affected. And yet no notice has appeared on HHS’s public breach tool even now.
Memorial Hospital & Manor (“MH-M”) subsequently posted a substitute notice on its website dated February 10. In their notice, they refer to a data security incident but never use the word “ransomware” or indicate the individual or group that attacked them. The notice does state, however, that an unauthorized individual accessed and acquired information that may have included patient name, Social Security number, date of birth, health insurance information, and medical treatment and/or history information.
MH-M states that they promptly notified the FBI of the incident. They make no mention of notifying HHS, and as of publication, there is still no incident reported on HHS’s public breach tool.
But of greater concern is MH-M’s total silence about the fact that this was a ransomware attack and the attackers have dumped the data they acquired.
Embargo Leaks the Data
Although MH-M does not seem to have informed patients that their protected health information has been leaked on the dark web, it has been leaked. The Embargo ransomware group had claimed to have acquired 1.15 TB of files, which they dumped when MH-M did not meet their demands for payments.
DataBreaches examined parts of the data tranche and also reached out to Embargo to ask whether the hospital had ever responded to them at all or attempted to negotiate with them.
A spokesperson for Embargo informed DataBreaches that yes, MH-M had attempted to negotiate:
“they offer 500k, we declined”
DataBreaches is not implying any criticism of MH-M for not paying ransom. What this site is questioning is why HHS was not notified and why it hasn’t informed to warn patients that their data has been leaked.
DataBreaches sent an inquiry to MH-M on February 14 asking both questions. There has been no reply as of publication.