Phishing Attack on DePaul impacted emails of Health Program Clients

DePaul, the provider of healthcare services as well as assisted living facilities in New York, South Carolina, and North Carolina, is impacted by a phishing attack. On Feb. 1, 2019, the officials of DePaul have discovered that email account of an employee was compromised in a phishing attack. That compromised email account of an employee was secured immediately by DePaul.

The investigation of this breach confirmed that an email account was compromised, as an employee become victim of a phishing scam as per the breach investigators. The email account impacted by the phishing attack on DePaul contained around 41,000 emails of health program clients. All these 41,000 emails have been checked in order to find whether they contain any type of sensitive information.

Most of the 41,000 emails in compromised email account did not have any significant psychiatric or medical information; although a few of those emails contained information like first names as well as last names, dob (dates of birth), and the Social Security numbers.

The aim of this phishing attack on DePaul gives the impression that the attackers' want to use compromised email account in order to send more phishing emails to various other individuals, as per the officials. No evidence has been found which will suggest that the attacker has viewed or copied any emails containing the sensitive information, although possibility of that cannot be ruled out. So, DePaul is notifying a number of patients of their behavioral health program that some of their PHI (Protected Health Information) was possibly compromised because of this phishing attack.

All the individuals who are affected in this cyberattack on DePaul, and whose Social Security number has been potentially compromised were offered one year credit monitoring services for free by DePaul. Besides, DePaul - the provider of healthcare services as well as assisted living facilities - will provide their staff's additional training, so that they can identify the malicious emails in order to stop a recurrence. Additionally, the email security defenses of DePaul will be strengthened further.

The breach portal of HHS' Office for Civil Rights shows that 902 members of DePaul were affected by this breach.

» SPAMfighter News - 4/19/2019