Health Care Giant Ascension Says 5.6 Million Patients Affected In Cyberattack

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Health care company Ascension lost sensitive data for nearly 5.6 million individuals in a cyberattack that was attributed to a notorious ransomware gang, according to documents filed with the attorney general of Maine. Ascension owns 140 hospitals and scores of assisted living facilities. In May, the organization was hit with an attack that caused mass disruptions as staff was forced to move to manual processes that caused errors, delayed or lost lab results, and diversions of ambulances to other hospitals. Ascension managed to restore most services by mid-June. At the time, the company said the attackers had stolen protected health information and personally identifiable information for an undisclosed number of people.

A filing Ascension made earlier in December revealed that nearly 5.6 million people were affected by the breach. Data stolen depended on the particular person but included individuals' names and medical information (e.g., medical record numbers, dates of service, types of lab tests, or procedure codes), payment information (e.g., credit card information or bank account numbers), insurance information (e.g., Medicaid/Medicare ID, policy number, or insurance claim), government identification (e.g., Social Security numbers, tax identification numbers, driver's license numbers, or passport numbers), and other personal information (such as date of birth or address). Ascension is now in the process of notifying affected individuals. The organization is also offering two years of credit and fraud monitoring, a $1 million insurance reimbursement policy, and managed ID theft recovery services. The services became effective last Thursday. Further reading: Black Basta Ransomware Attack Brought Down Ascension IT Systems, Report Finds

drop from tables unpaidbills

[Joe_Dragon]

drop from tables unpaidbills

Re:

[shanen]

Mod parent Funny, but the lack of comments on the topic may be the larger joke. (It's at the bottom of the page now, and this will be the fifth comment.) Apparently Slashdotters think it doesn't apply to them.

beware

[Anonymous Coward]

So the answer to having your info jacked is to give every little detail about you and your personal details to yet another 3rd party and their "partners" (who will also sell that information to any LLC that pays enough), that is until they get hacked then back to step 1.

2-3 years of credit monitoring is a joke and should be treated as nothing more than a "free trial", except you are now worse off as you have given away your data to another broker.

They don't want you to know this...

[CEC-P]

I used to work there and it was right before we rolled out Epic in the Midwest. The region switched IT providers to HCL and they're AWFUL! Absolutely clueless, understaffed, unqualified idiots. This was right before the ransomware attack, but what they don't want you to know, was that they were hit by another ransomware attack prior to 2022. That one was quieter but the funny part was, it was one of the IT technicians downloading a tool that he knew was safe, except from a site that rigged it with malware. Then he ran it with admin permissions. That was partially why they switched to HCL after some scumbag salesman sold them absolute lies. Then the Epic project went over budget drastically too btw.

I'm Shocked

[gkelley]

I'm surprised that the personal injury lawyers haven't filed class action suits against these companies yet. Allowing all this personally identifiable information to be stolen should be subject to some kind of penalty that hurts enough to make a point to all companies that hold your sensitive data.