Breach of the Month – Monongalia Health System
- In 2021, more than 550 firms reported healthcare data breaches to HHS, affecting more than 40 million people.
- Healthcare data breaches are expanding at an exponential rate year after year, and they don’t appear to be slowing down anytime soon.
- It’s critical for healthcare IT service workers to take precautions to protect their systems, whether it’s from external threats such as hackers and cybercriminals or from internal dangers such as access misuse by internal users.
- Working with the proper Healthcare MSP Providers would have greatly reduced the chances of such a breach on this business.
Let’s talk about an incident that occurred recently.
Such an incident happened with the Monongalia Health System. They learned of a data security incident resulting in an unauthorized person gaining access to its IT network on December 18, 2021, according to a notification placed on the company’s website.
On December 30, 2021, the firm determined that an unauthorized person had gained access to some sensitive information belonging to some patients, providers, employees, and contractors as a result of the event. Monongalia Health System examined the affected files after learning of the security breach’s scope to discover what information had been compromised. A vendor reported not receiving payment in July 2021, which led to the discovery of the security breach. The attackers diverted a financial transfer using the hacked email accounts. The email accounts were compromised between May 10, 2021, and August 15, 2021, according to the inquiry, and they contained the protected health information of 398,164 individuals. IT systems were not affected by this occurrence.
One of the most serious problems with technology, in my opinion, is data privacy. With growing digital activities, cybersecurity dangers are more common than ever before. This has attracted a large number of hackers, who are becoming more sophisticated and targeting a wider range of businesses. Mon Health was not able to exclude the possibility of unauthorized access to files containing medical and clinical treatment information of a current or former Mon Health patient or Mon Health’s employee health plan members.
The company has subsequently strengthened network security and will continue to deploy additional protections and technical security measures to further protect and monitor its systems, according to the company. They should partner with healthcare MSP providers who can ensure that transactions are easy and that patient data is always secure. Mon Health is continuing to assess and improve its existing security measures and processes, including the adoption of multi-factor authentication for remote access to its email system, to help avoid something like this from happening again.
That was all about our first ever “Breach Of The Month” blog post. We will keep you posted with more updated blogs regularly. We hope you found this informative and useful. We have tried to focus on the incident as closely as possible and in detail.
For more information on protecting your business from the ever growing cyber threats, take a look at our CORE Complete Care program. Being the longest running MSP in the area we are proud to announce we have a 100% success rate in protecting our managed clients from Ransomware. Learn more about CORE Complete Care here: CORE Complete Care
