DailyPost 2749
CITY OF HOPE
Nothing is unbreachable or so the hackers believe and practice. One is the expertise and the persistence to be able to make a hole anywhere, whatever might be the nature of effort. The more intriguing part is that they would not exempt any institution or organization or enterprise. For them no institution is sacred. In this falls City of Hope. It would be termed as one of the craziest hacks of our times. Cancer treatment and research center City of Hope recently notified over 800,000 individuals that there personal and health information was compromised in a data breach.
City of Hope is a National Cancer Institute designated comprehensive cancer center. It is located at Duarte, California and has a network of clinical practice locations across the US. Herein, lies its importance. As is the case in most of the breaches, the breach to detection time runs into months if not years. It means that the victim and accused share the same digital /operational space for a long time after the offence. This is simply cruel from any standpoint. The data breach occurred between Sept 19 and October 12, 2023, the center has stated in the notification letter to the impacted individuals.
The Maine Attorney General’s Office also been communicated. It is said that within the timeframe mentioned above, an unauthorized third party accessed a subset of City of Hope systems and copied some files containing the affected individual’s information. They claim that “that there is no indication of any identity theft or fraud occurring as a result of this incident.” The stolen data includes personally identifiable information inclusive of health insurance information and medical information. Though the detection of the case is itself delayed yet the center claims that once the breach was known, it made efforts to contain it.
Law enforcement was informed and the management retained a cyber security firm to improve the security of its systems. What is proactive is the fact that the affected individuals are being offered identity monitoring services for two years. Today’s reality is that healthcare has also become a target of hackers, may be from the critical infrastructure point of view or for selling data over the Dark Net. It seems farfetched to believe that it would have been stolen for research and development purposes or done for some competing institution or nation. Only thorough investigation would reveal the purpose behind it.
FOR HACKERS THERE ARE NO HOLY COWS.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.