The personal information of hundreds of thousands of patients of CentraState Medical Center was exposed in a December cyberattack of its online systems, the hospital said.
The hospital in late December acknowledged an “IT security issue” but gave little information as to what went wrong. In a subsequent investigation, the hospital says it found that an “unauthorized person” obtained a copy of its archived database, allowing them to steal information on a whopping 617,000 patients.
Information taken from the database includes names, addresses, date of birth, social security numbers, health insurance information, medical record numbers, patient account numbers, doctor notes, prescription information, and more.
CentraState has begun contacting affected patients and offering the free credit monitoring and identity protection services.
“CentraState deeply regrets any concern this incident may have caused and is continually enhancing the security of its electronic systems and the patient data it maintains to help prevent events such as this from occurring the in the future,” a statement from the hospital reads.
The FBI and local law enforcement agencies are now involved in attempting to track down who is responsible for the database breach.