Aspire Health Lost 'Protected Health Information' after Getting Hacked by a Phishing Scheme

As per the report of The Tennessean, Aspire Health, a huge healthcare company of Nashville, which offers its services of in-home treatment to 25 states, was hacked, early in the month of September. The attack by an unknown cyberattacker, led to the loss of a few patient's information as well.

The hack was disclosed for the very first time in the federal court records that was filed on September 25, 2018 (i.e. Tuesday). The hack took place after a phishing attack got access to Aspire Health's internal email system on September 3, 2018. As per the court records, 124 emails are then forwarded by the hacker to another external email account. The forwarded emails also included "protected health information" and "confidential and proprietary information and files".

However, the detailed information about the hacked emails' content are still not being made public, and it is still unclear that how many patients' information were effected in the attack. According to the prepared statement that was obtained by The Tennessean, Aspire Health has said that it has send alerts to a small number of patients who may got impacted by this email breach. The other patients who were really concerned about the email breach are advised to make a call at the company's 24 hour helpline number - 615-346-8468.

Chief Compliance Officer of Aspire Health, Cory Brown, wrote to The Tennessean in an email that Aspire's locked the hacked email account immediately after knowing about the phishing attack. Cory Brown further added that it is still not known whether the stolen emails were opened by the attackers or not.

"Aspire takes the security of its data and the personal information of its patients very seriously," Brown added in that email statement. "Aspire is now working through the legal process to determine if any Aspire information was ultimately accessed by a third-party".

As per the filed court records on September 25, 2018 (i.e. Tuesday), Aspire Health said that they have tried to identify who the hacker was, but was not able to do so. It was revealed that the origin of the phishing attack was from a website that has an IP address of Eastern Europe and the registrar is Google. The emails that were hacked were also being forwarded to an email address that belongs to Google - otozec2015@gmail.com.

Since the discovery of the phishing attack, that website of Eastern Europe was flagged as 'deceptive' by Google.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/8/2018