Presbyterian Healthcare Services suffered from a data breach

Presbyterian Healthcare Services based in New Mexico has suffered from a data breach, thus impacting almost 183000 patients as well as health plan members, when some of its employees became victim of a phishing scam.

Presbyterian Healthcare Services discovered on Jun. 6, 2019, that unauthorized third-party has gained access to a few employee email accounts of Presbyterian's around May 9 of this year (i.e. 2019). After discovering this, compromised email accounts were secured by Presbyterian and they also began a detailed review of impacted emails. Moreover, appropriate federal law enforcement was also notified by the healthcare center about this incident.

The email accounts that were compromised contain health plan member and/or patient names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, health plan information and/or clinical information. The affected individuals were offered complimentary identity theft protection and credit monitoring services for one year, and also were advised to carefully monitor their accounts as well as explanation of benefits statements for any kind of fraudulent activity. However, Dale Maxwell, Presbyterian's CEO and President, in a statement said that no evidence of accessing the billing information or electronic health record is found.

For protecting their email system as well as to avoid this kind of incidents from occurring in future, Presbyterian has taken many necessary steps as well as has implemented more security measures. In addition, Presbyterian is further providing training to their employees about ways to protect the information stored electronically as well as ways to avoid the phishing scams.

"At Presbyterian, we take the responsibility of protecting the privacy of our patients and members very seriously. We deeply regret that this event occurred and are committed to taking steps to help prevent this type of incident from happening again," said Maxwell, as reported by Albuquerque Journal.

Jodi McGinnis Porter, New Mexico Human Services Department's Director of Communications, confirmed that a few of those impacted residents were recipients of Medicaid.

183,000 patients are getting notified by Presbyterian Healthcare Services that their medical and personal information was possibly breached in a month-long phishing attack. As per a security notice, Presbyterian said that "we are very sorry that unauthorized access to some of the workforce members' emails occurred. We are not aware of any improper use, or attempted use of your information, but we believe it is important to notify you of this incident".

» SPAMfighter News - 8/28/2019