On August 13, external counsel for Colonial Pipeline notified the Maine Attorney General’s Office that on July 1, the firm’s investigation into the May DarkSide ransomware attack revealed that personally identifiable and protected health information for some people had been accessed:
Based on our investigation, we recently learned that the incident affected certain of your personal information. On May 6, 2021, an unauthorized third party acquired certain records stored in our systems. The affected records contained certain personal information, such as name, contact information, date of birth, government-issued ID (such as Social Security, military ID, tax ID, and driver’s license numbers), and health-related information (including health insurance information). Not all of this information was affected for each impacted individual.
The Georgia-headquartered firm’s notification offers those affected two years of identity restoration and credit monitoring services through Experian. It does, not, however, make any mention of the ransom paid (and mostly recovered to the threat actors) and whether the threat actors had claimed to have destroyed these data before their servers were seized or controlled by others.
Under the circumstances, it might be prudent for those being notified to assume the worst — that their data was not only stolen, but it was not destroyed and is in the hands of those who wouldn’t hesitate to misuse it. Such assumptions won’t give you Article III standing in most courts to sue Colonial Pipeline, but it may get you off the dime to protect yourself.
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