Sometimes it takes months until I see a notification related to a leak I reported to an entity.
This week, Mobile Anesthesiologists disclosed a data leak. Their notification is embedded below. The back story on this one is that in December, a researcher alerted DataBreaches.net to a leak involving what appeared to be ePHI from multiple locations of an anesthesiology-related practice. The data were exposed on an Azure storage blob. By cross-matching locations, DataBreaches.net determined that the data were likely associated with AMS-MD and/or Mobile Anesthesiology, LLC. Over the course of my communications with Josh Gantz from AMS-MD, I learned that the leak was Mobile Anesthesiologist’s.
With the researcher’s consent, I was able to tell them what IP address in their logs would be the researcher’s, so they could understand any access from that IP address. The researcher also agreed to destroy any data they had downloaded. As is this site’s policy, however, DataBreaches.net has not deleted the data provided to this site until this incident appears on HHS or is otherwise fully disclosed so that this site can ensure that the number reported and other details are consistent with what was leaked.
So far, nothing has appeared on HHS’s public breach tool for this incident under either entity’s name, so we do not have reported numbers yet, but HHS does not always promptly post submissions. Given that notification letters just went out this week, it may show up soon on HHS’s site. It is probably outside of the 60-day window from the time they were notified of the leak and should have “discovered” it, but they will probably claim that they only “discovered” it on January 28. This post will be updated when their reported number is available.
Updated March 24: This incident was reported to HHS on March 10 as impacting 65,403 patients.