Eventus WholeHealth, PLLC (“Eventus”) provides integrated primary care and mental health services to medically vulnerable adults. In a press release issued this week, they disclose a breach involving protected health information.
“On June 1, 2022, we observed suspicious activity associated with a single Eventus email account, despite multifactor authentication on the account.”
Comment: That statement is a bit different than what we usually read. To their credit, they were already deploying multifactor authentication and some recipients of their notification letter will realize that means that they had been attempting to secure data properly.
But that wasn’t the only noteworthy statement in their notification. They wrote:
Please note that we have no evidence that the unauthorized third party actually viewed any of your information, but because we cannot prove that they did not, we are required by law to provide you with this notice.
Comment: Congratulations to them for not trying to claim that they were (only) notifying “in an abundance of caution” when the law actually requires notification. DataBreaches wishes more entities would adopt the language Eventus used.
And yet another aspect of their incident response that is a bit different: Eventus states that they have been notifying individuals on an ongoing basis as they are identified as having information in the compromised account. They didn’t wait until they had completed everything — they began notification as soon as they identified an individual was affected.
Eventus is offering those being notified a complimentary one-year membership of Experian IdentityWorksSM Credit 3B and they encourage people to enroll in it.
You can read their full notification on the Montana Attorney General’s website.
As of publication, there is no notice on Eventus’ website and no listing on HHS’s public breach tool, although they appear to be covered by HIPAA. The HHS notice will probably appear on HHS’s site soon.