For those who are misinterpreting the headline as an activity where hackers leaked data on the internet for not getting the demanded sum as a ransom, here’s a briefing.
Health Management Concepts (HMC), an online resource which educates, empowers and advocates individuals in improving their health and well being is reported to have become a victim of Ransomware attack on July 16th this year. It’s said that the server which used to share health care related files with clients was held for ransom after the data encryption.
HMC which provides chronic condition management to IBU- Inlandboatmen’s United of the Pacific National Benefit Funds decided to hire a 3rd party cyber security company to investigate the incident.
On July 19th, 2018, a forensic firm was engaged to handle the situation. But unfortunately, the team of experts who were investigating the incident unintentionally shared a file containing personal info like patients names, social security numbers and health insurance data with the hackers. The shared data includes info regarding IBU members and some New Hampshire Residents.
HMC disclosed the whole incident to the media early this week and said that it will try its best that such incidents do not occur in future. The healthcare service provider has also migrated its server to another cloud computing server and is said to have disabled remote server access named RDP on a permanent note.
Officials of HMC are not yet ready to disclose the details on the affected number of victims and how the personal info reached the attackers.
Hence, more details are awaited!
