Mission Community Hospital Alerts Patients About May 2023 Cyberattack
Mission Community Hospital, an acute care hospital serving the patients of the San Fernando Valley in California, has started notifying patients that some of their personal and protected health information was exposed in a May 2023 cyberattack.
Unauthorized access to its network was discovered on May 1, 2023, and the forensic investigation determined that an unauthorized third party accessed its network the same day, including files that contained patient data. The review of the files revealed they contained names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, financial account information, health insurance plan member IDs, claims data, and clinical information related to the care received at Mission Community Hospital.
Affected individuals have been offered a complimentary one-year membership to a credit monitoring and identity theft protection service. Mission Community Hospital said it has implemented additional safeguards and technical security measures to further protect and monitor its systems. The HHS’ Office for Civil Rights breach portal still shows the placeholder of 500 records in a report submitted on June 30, 2023. 500 is a commonly used placeholder to meet breach reporting requirements until the number of individuals affected is known.
The breach notification letter did not include details about the nature of the attack other than stating ” files containing some of your information may have been subject to unauthorized access,”; however, this appears to have been a ransomware attack. The RansomHouse ransomware group claimed responsibility for the attack and has added Mission Community Hospital to its dark web data leak site. In the listing, the group claims to have infiltrated “more than 2.5 TB” of data. The listing has a downloadable evidence pack, which consists of screenshots of its file system that appear to have been taken on April 16, 2023, around two weeks before unauthorized access was detected. The HIPAA Journal has confirmed that no data is currently showing on the listing, only the screenshots, which could indicate that the data has been sold per the group’s threat or the group is still holding out for payment. Listings are usually removed from data leak sites if a ransom is paid.
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RansomHouse was behind a 2023 attack on Warren General Hospital, the listing for which is still on the group’s data leak site along with evidence packs, although there has been no data dump so far. Warren General Hospital recently reported the breach to OCR as affecting 168,921 individuals. A March 2023 attack on Albany ENT & Allergy Services is also listed, which includes a full data dump. According to the OCR breach portal, 224,486 patients of Albany ENT were affected by the attack.
