An example of a huge medical data breach when cyber-hackers had access to 30,000 patients’ information; including test results

In recent years, the healthcare industry has been a big target for cyber-hackers, and there have been some huge cases reported. The healthcare industry leads the way in terms of the highest number of breaches and leaks in the U.K. and in other countries too, and in one example we’ll take a look at here, a hospital suffered a medical data breach that reportedly affected some 30,000 patients.

A medical breach involving 30,000 patients is absolutely monumental!

Nature of the breach

On 15 August 2016, the Integrity Transitional Hospital in Texas reported ‘abnormal activity‘ on a database. A forensics firm looked into the matter and found that cyber-hackers had managed to get access to the database, potentially seeing the Hospital patients’ test results, health insurance data and driver’s licence information.

After the data breach, the Hospital released a statement to reassure their patients that:

“Integrity [Hospital] is committed to the security of the sensitive information it maintains and is taking this matter very seriously. To help prevent a similar incident from reoccurring, we are enhancing existing security on our systems related to the laboratory information we maintain.”

As is often the case, though, the damage has already been done. Why didn’t the Hospital have adequate security protections in place beforehand?

Actions taken by Integrity Hospital

Affected patients were notified of the breach on 14 October and were offered credit-monitoring and identity theft protection membership to Experian’s ProtectMyID service for a year.

Many companies and organisations fail to have adequate cybersecurity in place, and many even admit they wouldn’t know what to do in the event of a cyber-attack. Time and time again, they seek to respond to the data breach after it has happened instead of having preventative methods in place. This data breach triggered the Hospital to conduct a full security review and up their cybersecurity measures, which was something they could have done without having to wait for a breach to happen first.

The Hospital said that additional data security measures will be implemented to ensure all information held by the Hospital will be better protected.