Advocate Aurora Health(AAH), a medical services provider serving Wisconsin and Illinois populace, was hit by a data breach affecting over 3,000,000 patients. According to the information available to Cybersecurity Insiders, AAH websites are loaded by Meta Pixel, and hackers used a vulnerability in the software tool to access information.
Technically, Meta Pixel is a Facebook researchers supplied JavaScript code based analytics tool that assists website owners to gain insights on user interaction with their web portal, thus helping them to improve their marketing tactics.
Recently, it was found that Meta was sharing the data secretly with a vast network of marketing companies that target patients with related ads.
Preliminary analysis made by security experts of AAH revealed hackers accessed the following info, such as IP address, dates and times of scheduled appointments, gist of patient’s medical history, insurance data and proxy account info.
As this practice is against the data privacy rules of the United States, it can lead to a situation where the healthcare service provider can also be heavily penalized via class action lawsuits.
Moreover, the tool is being used by other hospitals in the country and so it could lead to more such data breaches in near time.
NOTE- Novant Health, another medical services provider disclosed in an official statement of August this year of Mega Pixel compromising its ‘MyChart’ Portal, exposing 1.3 million patients.
