On May 5 UCLA Health System determined that its computer systems had suffered a massive hack.
The cyber attack compromised the data of millions of UCLA patients according to the University:
“the attacker had accessed parts of the UCLA Health network that contain personal information, like name, address, date of birth, social security number, medical record number, Medicare or health plan ID number, and some medical information (e.g., medical condition, medications, procedures, and test results)”
These appears to be one of the largest health system hacks ever. The attack exposed the personal and medical information of 4.5 million people:
“Our investigation has revealed that the personal information of about 4.5 million individuals, including UCLA Health patients and providers who sought privileges at any UCLA Health hospital, was maintained on the impacted parts of the UCLA Health network. At this time, there is no evidence that the attacker actually accessed or acquired the personal or medical information maintained on the impacted parts of the UCLA Health network, but we cannot conclusively rule out that possibility. Thus, we wanted to make potentially impacted individuals aware of this cyber attack and provide them with information about how to protect themselves.”
As best as is known at this point no other UC schools or medical facilities were attacked. A forensic investigation of the attack is ongoing.
CVS photo also suffered a hack.
At some point will privacy become an anachronism?
Jeanne raises an interesting point. Certainly there are a great many underemployed people — and that really rankles me. But it is a mistake to think that hackers are underemployed. Using electronic means to gather information about people is done in so many ways by so many people for so many purposes that I would argue that it has become a huge industry that makes the military-industrial complex look like a friendly side-show.
Like all industries, it is practised in ways that vary from legal to illegal and from moral to immoral and from benign to malignant. And it would be a massive mistake to think that legal is antithetical to immoral and malignant…
Nowadays, governments are probably the biggest “hackers” — but then, they always were, only the means have changed. I shudder to think of what Hitler and Stalin would have achieved if they had the world wide web at their disposal.
Interestingly, exposing the goings-on of governments is the most dangerous type of hacking; consider the persecution of: Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Jeffrey Sterling, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, James Rosen, Li Zhuang, Guo Guangchong, and countless others who have simply been “disappeared”…
We need to find jobs for the hackers– they have too much time on their hands.