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UK healthcare data breach overview:
- Who: Barts Health NHS Trust has confirmed it is investigating a cybersecurity incident perpetrated by the ransomware group ALPHV, also known as Black Cat.
- Why: The ransomware incident is believed to have exposed employee ID documents, driver’s licenses, passports, and “confidential” internal emails.
- Where: The data breach impacts individuals across the UK.
Barts Health NHS Trust has confirmed it is investigating a cybersecurity incident after being added to the dark web leak site of a ransomware gang claiming to have stolen 70 terabytes of sensitive data.
Barts Health, which runs five hospitals located in London, has neither denied that it was affected by a cybersecurity incident, nor that samples of stolen data shared by the ransomware group, ALPHV, were not legitimate, reports TechCrunch.
The incident, which ALPHV is calling the biggest healthcare data breach in the UK, reportedly exposed data such as employee identification documents, driver’s licenses, passports, and “confidential” internal emails.
ALPHV — which also goes by the name Black Cat — first listed Barts Health on its dark web site on June 30, reports TechCrunch.
Barts Health, which serves more than 2.5 million patients, was given three days to contact ALPHV to keep the hacking group from publicizing data stolen in the breach, however, as of July 10, none of the information compromised during the data breach has been published, reports TechCrunch.
National Cyber Security Centre investigating Barts Health data breach
The National Cyber Security Centre is reportedly investigating the incident, which represents the second time in recent weeks that NHS data has been compromised in a cybersecurity incident.
In June, a ransomware attack targeting the University of Manchester compromised a dataset containing information pertaining to 1.1 million patients spread across 200 hospitals, reports TechCrunch.
In that incident, bad actors were reportedly able to compromise data that was gathered by the University of Manchester for research purposes and included the first three letters of patients’ postcodes, along with NHS numbers.
A class action lawsuit was filed against Google, its AI company DeepMind Technologies, and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust in 2021 over claims they violated data protection laws by allegedly sharing information of 1.6 million NHS users amongst themselves.
Have you been impacted by a data breach affecting the healthcare industry in the UK? Let us know in the comments!
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