Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, Georgia, recently announced that it had been hit by a massive
data breach as a result of 10 disks it misplaced.
The incident was announced on April 18, and potentially exposed the personal information for more than 315,000 people who received surgical care at the hospital between September 1990 and April 2007, according to a report from
eWeek. Of the 315,000 files exposed, 228,000 or so included patients' Social Security numbers, and other data included patients' names, dates of surgeries, diagnoses and procedure codes.
The disks, which were unencrypted, were kept in an unlocked cabinet and contained data for outdated software that the company no longer used, the report said. They disappeared sometime between February 7 and 20, but the company did not begin alerting patients until April 17.
Ondrej Krehel, chief information security officer for
Identity Theft 911, has a blog about the dangers consumers face in the wake of
data breaches involving their personal information, and what they can do to protect that information.
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