May 13th, 2009 |
E-health has always been one of the feel-good stories about e-government. Even mainstream media outlets love to report on how technology helps these days with everything from organizing information to conducting brain surgery. Their accounts are usually warm and fuzzy in the extreme.
So it’s useful to be reminded every once in a while of the downside of e-health – which, unsurprisingly, is a security yarn.
The government site NextGov reported the other day on an unnerving incident in which hackers broke into a Virginia state site used by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse. The nogoodniks deleted records on more than 8 million patients and then “replaced the site’s homepage with a ransom note demanding $10 million for the return of the records, according to a posting on Wikileaks.org, an online clearinghouse for leaked documents.”
Wikileaks also favored us with the ransom note:
“I have your [expletive]. In my possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too. Uhoh 
For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password).”
Virginia shut down the site soon after the attack was discovered on April 30 and began restoring the system, but there’s no further word on the outcome, legally or otherwise.
So: A small story, in a way. But useful to the extent that it reminds all of us to be careful out there, people, to reach back well before health care hooked up with data management. (Hill Street Blues, since you asked).
