About two million patients’ data had been exposed to the public after a Massachusetts-based healthcare firm, Shields Health Care Group, suffered from a data breach due to hackers infiltrating their servers to steal data.
The Shields healthcare firm provides medical services to their clients and partners, specialising in MRI and PET/CT diagnostic imaging, radiology, and ambulance services. Based on reports, the firm was alerted about being attacked last March 18, to which they immediately hired cybersecurity experts to help assess and mitigate the incident.
After the cybersecurity analysts had examined Shield’s log files, they discovered that the hackers had access to their systems from March 7 until March 21. This time window allowed the threat actors to access the healthcare firm’s sensitive patient information database.
The compromised patients’ data from the breach are full names, birthdates, home addresses, health diagnoses, social security numbers, billing information, medical record number, insurance information, patient ID, and other medical details significant to the healthcare firm.
Cybercriminals could exploit all the stolen sensitive data from Shields for several attack vectors such as phishing, identity fraud, extortion, and social engineering. As for now, the healthcare firm stated that there are no indications that any of the data were used for malicious activities. Nevertheless, experts are still warning that the probability of hackers exploiting the data remains high.
Additionally, security experts have estimated that the data breach incident impacts about two million of Shields’ patients and healthcare partners. This finding concludes that the effect of the breach could be a massive one.
Shields have also shared an extensive list of all the healthcare facilities at risk due to the incident, including the Winchester Hospital, the Central Maine Medical Center, and the Tufts Medical Center. Until the incident investigation is done, the healthcare firm will yet to inform the impacted individuals and organisations.
Federal law enforcement agencies have also been reached to help Shields control the incident.
