The following is a Google machine translation of a post by Italy’s data protection regulator. It strikes me yet again how entities covered by the GDPR get fined for poor or inadequate security practices that should — but generally do not — incur monetary penalties here:
Sanction by the Privacy Guarantor of 30,000 euros to a Neapolitan local health authority for failing to adequately protect the personal data and health data of 842,000 patients and employees from hacker attacks.
The healthcare facility had suffered a ransomware attack which, through a virus, had limited access to the healthcare facility’s database and requested a ransom to restore the functioning of the systems.
As required by the legislation on the protection of personal data, the ASL had communicated the data breach to the Guarantor who immediately opened an investigation into the incident to verify the technical and organizational measures adopted by the ASL both before and after the attack right away.
Several important critical issues were identified by the Guarantor following the inspection activity, such as the failure to adopt adequate measures to promptly detect the violation of personal data and to guarantee the security of the networks, also in violation of the principle of data protection by design (privacy by design). Access to the network via VPN took place through an authentication procedure based only on the use of username and password. Furthermore, the lack of network segmentation had caused the virus to spread throughout the entire IT infrastructure.
In sanctioning the offense, the Guarantor took into account the fact that the data breach concerned data suitable for collecting information on the health of a very significant number of interested parties, but also the unintentional and collaborative attitude of the Local Health Authority. After the incident, the company adopted a series of measures aimed not only at mitigating the damage suffered by the interested parties, but also at reducing the replicability of the event itself, including the activation of a network access procedure via VPN with double factor authentication.