Medical Data of 1 Million New Zealanders Potentially Exposed in Health System Breach

The health organization realized during an investigation of an August breach that its systems had been breached several times prior to the known attack.

• By Haley Samsel
• Oct 14, 2019

A data breach at a primary health organization, or PHO, in New Zealand may have led to the exposure of the medical data of about 1 million people. 

Tū Ora Compass Health, which had its systems and website hacked in August, is now revealing the potential ramifications of data breaches going back from 2016 to March 2019, TechRadar reported. 

The full scale of the PHO’s cybersecurity issues was revealed as part of its investigation of the August breach. A statement from Tū Ora said that the organization is not sure if patient data was compromised or even accessed by an outside group. 

“Despite careful investigation, we cannot say for certain whether or not the cyber attacks resulted in any individual patient information being accessed. It is likely we will never know," the statement said. 

While the PHO oversees an area with a population of 648,000 people, the number of patients with exposed data goes into the millions because Tū Ora maintains data going back to 2002. Some of that data included names, ages, ethnicities and addresses in addition to more personal medical information, including smoking status, immunizations and more. 

The New Zealand health ministry has been notified of the cyber attack, and all PHOS and health boards in the country were ordered to review their “external facing” cyber security by Oct. 8, according to The Dominion Post, a New Zealand news site. Tū Ora said it will move to a more “modern” and secure infrastructure with Microsoft Azure. 

“The new Tū Ora Microsoft Azure environment will be fully secured, with a defense in depth approach to protecting all our electronic assets,” the organization said. 

Jonathan Deveaux, the head of enterprise data protection at comforte AG, said that the case showed that the PHO did not appear to have encryption protections on the data itself and left it in clear text form. 

“It’s a good thing that no payment info, tax numbers, passport numbers, nor driver’s license numbers were on the server; otherwise, those data elements would have been exposed as well,” Deveaux said. “It seems there may be some technology and business leaders who are still accepting the risk that their data is of no interest to hackers, or their business model is unattractive for threat-actors to access. The PHO data breach, and many other breaches reported, proves that this is not the case.”