On or about July 7, Karakurt threat actors added Jefferson County Health Center in Iowa to their leak site to pressure them to pay ransom demands.
Or was it Jefferson County Hospital in Oklahoma that they had hit? Right below their heading claiming it was the Iowa facility, their text indicated it was the similarly named hospital in Oklahoma.
So which was it? There was no proof of claim provided that might have shown us a letterhead or something to help solve the puzzle, and their expanded listing, seen below, was also of no help as it names the Iowa facility in the headline and the Oklahoma entity in the body of the text.
DataBreaches called both entities when the listing appeared and emailed them again recently to ask whether they had been hit by Karakurt. Neither entity responded or posted anything on their respective websites about any breach.
But now Jefferson County Health Center has submitted a breach notification to the Vermont Attorney General’s Office. The letter says, in relevant part, that on May 30, they discovered suspicious activity on their system. An investigation determined an unknown actor had access between April 4 and May 30 and may have accessed and acquired files containing patients’ name, medical history, diagnosis, treatment information, and health insurance information.
The notification does not name Karakurt as the unknown actor(s) or mention whether they received any ransom demand. Nor do they mention whether they are aware that they have been named on a leak site by those who threaten that they will leak the stolen data soon.
As of publication, there is still no notice on JCHC’s website about any incident, and nothing has appeared on HHS’s public breach tool yet so we have yet to learn how many patients, total, were affected.
Karakurt has yet to leak any data, but claims to have 1 TB of files. JCHC is offering those affected 12 months of credit monitoring and claims that they have no evidence that the data has been subjected to actual or attempted misuse. That may be true, but should they have informed them that Karakurt had already threatened to leak the data on an established leak site?
DataBreaches will continue to monitor for updates to this incident.