A database error at Washington’s UW Medicine left crucial patient data exposed resulted in a breach affecting 974,000 individuals. However, it wasn’t the Seattle, Washington-based academic medical system that discovered the misconfiguration, as a patient was said to have made the discovery while doing a Google search on herself.
According to Fox, “a ‘vulnerability’ on a website server made protected internal files available and visible by searching on the internet. The website error happened Dec. 4, but wasn’t discovered by UW Medicine until Dec. 26.”
UW Medicine took to their website to write, “UW Medicine takes patient confidentiality very seriously and we sincerely regret that a data exposure occurred in Dec. 2018. Patients affected by this exposure are being notified by mail.”
Although not the first healthcare organization to experience this crucial error, they are currently the most recent. This occurrence has organizations, both healthcare and not, rethinking their IT and furthering their search to ensure a breach such as this won’t happen to them.
Threats are increasing day by day every small, medium and large scale company must adopt essential IT security measures.
