ClassActions.org reports that CareSouth Carolina has been hit with a potential class action lawsuit. The caption is Mixon v. CareSouth Carolina, Inc. § 4:22-CV-00269
You can access a copy of the complaint at https://www.classaction.org/media/mixon-v-caresouth-carolina-inc.pdf
The lawsuit stems from what the complaint describes as an attack against CareSouth in 2020 that was first reported to affected individuals in May, 2021.
As DataBreaches.net had found at the time, the breach was reported in May, 2021 to HHS as affecting 76,035 members. Digging into the matter revealed that CareSouth Carolina was just one of Netgain Technology’s clients who had been impacted by a ransomware attack on the IT company in 2020. In its notification to patients, CareSouth claimed that it did not obtain information from Netgain as to who was impacted until April 13, 2021:
On December 1, 2020, Netgain informed CareSouth Carolina that it was investigating an IT security incident. At that time, CareSouth Carolina had no reason to believe that patient information was involved. On January 14, 2021, Netgain informed CareSouth Carolina that its investigation found that some of servers that it maintained for CareSouth Carolina were affected as part of a ransomware attack on December 3, 2020. On April 13, 2021, CareSouth Carolina received a copy of the records that Netgain believed were affected by the attack. On April 27, 2021, CareSouth Carolina completed its review of the records and determined that your information was involved.
As noted in the lawsuit complaint, Netgain paid the unnamed attackers ransom to secure a promise that all data would be deleted, but such promises cannot really be relied upon.
The plaintiff, a Darlington County, South Carolina resident, claims her information was used by “nefarious actors” to open accounts in her name, which thus damaged her reputation and creditworthiness.
“None of the above responses by Defendant or NetGain are adequate to make the Plaintiff whole,” the suit reads.
Can CareSouth be successfully sued for a data security breach at their business associate? Netgain is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
Can the named plaintiff even demonstrate that the identity theft or financial harm she suffered stemmed from this incident and not some other incident? Surely if the threat actors were misusing data from more than 76,000 patients, there would be others all reporting problems at around the same time, no? And would there be any other clients of Netgain whose patients became victims of fraud or misuse of their data?
When there are so many breaches everywhere, how do you prove that one specific breach was the source of misused data if there are no tagged or mistyped records that can be definitively linked to only that source?