About 10,200 Plastic Surgery patients from South Dakota have been informed that a part of their PHI has been breached due to the Ransomware attack in Feb. According to the Associates of Plastic Surgery belonging to South Dakota found that virus got connected to the systems on 12th Feb 2017. In order to remove the ransomware from the systems, the authority took immediate steps and they also called the experts to determine and analyze the severity of the breach and to what extent the patients got affected.
Luckily, the health information of the patients was coded properly so most of the patients were not affected by the breach and even they didn’t know either their data has been encrypted or accessed. Although the data recovery process has been lost. Those filed show the data security confirmation that the data of some patients have not been affected by the breach.
On 24th April, the Associates of Plastic Surgery belonging to South Dakota stated that it is not possible to be sure about the access the PHI of 10,200 people without getting those evidences. The information that was stored on the system contained the SSN, the names, license numbers of drivers, the ID number of the state, results of the lab tests, debit or credit card information and the medical condition information.
The Associates of Plastic Surgery belonging to South Dakota stated that they did not find any report of misuse of the patients PHI. In-spite of this, the affected people have been provided with the identity security protection services and Equifax Credit Watch Silver credit monitoring membership for a year.
The Associates of Plastic Surgery belonging to South Dakota stated that it previously have strict security checks to protect the patient’s privacy and PHI secrecy and that, the security, confidentiality and the privacy of the information of their patients is their superior obligation. Due to the breach, the company improved their security terms and conditions and added more security checks for prevent such incidents in future.