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Oklahoma Home Health Company Reports Email Security Breach, 21K Impacted
Healthback Holdings reported an email security breach, and the City of Newport, Rhode Island and Minuteman Senior Services also reported recent breaches.
Healthback Holdings, a home health company based in Oklahoma, disclosed a healthcare data breach that impacted 21,114 individuals. Healthback discovered unauthorized activity within its employee email environment on June 1.
Healthback later determined that an unauthorized party gained access to a limited number of employee email accounts between October 5, 2021 and May 15, 2022. Investigators were unable to determine whether any email swere viewed by the unauthorized party, but they determined that the accounts contained names, health insurance information, clinical information, and Social Security numbers.
The home health company mailed letters to impacted individuals on July 29, and encouraged them to review their healthcare statements for accuracy.
“Healthback takes patient privacy and confidentiality very seriously,” the notice to patients said. “To help prevent something like this from happening again, we strengthened our email security protocols and provided additional training to our employees on how to detect and avoid phishing emails.”
City of Newport, RI Reports Employee Health Data Breach
The City of Newport, Rhode Island informed 6,109 past and current employees of a data breach that impacted their personal information.
The city detected unusual network activity on June 9 that rendered certain systems unavailable. Further investigation revealed that an unauthorized party obtained files stored on the city’s file servers.
The files contained the names, addresses, Social Security numbers, financial account information, birth dates, and group health insurance information of current and former employees and their spouses and dependents.
“The City takes this matter very seriously and regrets any inconvenience or concern this incident may cause,” the notice to impacted individuals stated.
“To help prevent something like this from happening again, the City is taking steps to further enhance the security of its network.”
Minuteman Senior Services Reports Email Security Incident
Massachusetts-based Minuteman Senior Services (MSS) reported an email breach that impacted 4,000 individuals. On June 1, MSS discovered suspicious activity on an employee’s email account. Further investigation determined that an unauthorized party had maintained access to the account for less than 24 hours.
MSS is still in the process of reviewing the information stored in the email account. The types of information that may have been in the account included names, birth dates, gender, addresses, health insurance information, service utilization, and diagnoses.
“MSS takes this event and information security very seriously. Upon learning of this event, we immediately secured the impacted email account,” the notice stated.
“As part of our ongoing commitment to the information security, we are enhancing our existing policies and procedures and implementing additional administrative and technical safeguards to further secure the information in our care.”
MSS encouraged impacted individuals to remain vigilant and review account statements, explanations of benefits, and credit reports.
