East House is a private, nonprofit agency in Rochester, New York that serves individuals with persistent mental illness and/or substance use disorder. Yesterday, they issued a press release about a breach:
ROCHESTER, N.Y., Feb. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Although unaware of any actual or attempted misuse, East House is providing notice of a data privacy event impacting the security of information relating to certain current and former residents and current, former, and prospective East House employees.
What happened? On July 25, 2019, East House became aware of suspicious activity relating to an employee email account. East House immediately launched an investigation to determine what may have happened. Working together with a leading computer forensics firm, East House determined that an unauthorized individual or individuals accessed one (1) employee email account between July 8, 2019 and July 25, 2019, and sensitive information contained therein was accessible to unknown individuals. On November 13, 2019, East House identified the individuals potentially impacted by this incident after a thorough programmatic and manual review of the email account. East House has worked since this time to locate valid mailing addresses for the potentially impacted individuals in order to provide notice of this event.
What information may have been affected by this incident? The accessed email account contained information related to certain current and former East House residents, as well as current, former, and prospective employees. The type of information affected varies per impacted individual, and includes one or more of the following types of information: name, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license number or state identification card number, treatment, and/or health-related information. For a very small number of individuals, financial account numbers were also affected.
Although they cannot confirm that any individual’s personal information was actually accessed, or viewed without permission, East House is providing this notice out of an abundance of caution. They do not have any evidence of actual or attempted misuse of any individual’s information as a result of this incident.
Read the full press release.