Data breaches and cyber attacks in January 2019 result in 1,769,185,063 records being accessed or compromised…and the deadline to opt out of MyHealth Record expires imminently

January 31, 2019 |

Itgovernance compiles monthly records of data breaches and works out, often from the victim of the data breaches the number of records leaked. In January 2019 it concluded that 1,769,185,063 records were accessed. That figure is eye wateringly large and even if the Collection#1 breach is not taken into account, which involved 772,904,991 records from historic data breaches it still means just under a billion records were affected.

And into this environment of steadily more effective cyber attacks and generally inadequate protections the Australian My Health Records system will now opt in the records of about 17 million Australians. The legislation has flaws, the system has bigger flaws and the experience overseas is that these centralised digitised health records are failures. Seven Thirty did a very interesting report of the MyHealth Record system.

What has always been the case is that Health Records are highly sought after by cyber criminals. For example, on 29 January the Verity Health System of California had to announce that there had been a data security incident while following from Singapore’s massive data breach last year involving the records of 1.5 million of its citizens the confidential information of 14,200 Singapore patients with HIV have been leaked on line by a fraudster who obtained access to the system.

Unfortunately the Australian My Health Records system was implemented with weak legislation with prohibitions riddled with exceptions and no shortage of arrogance by regulators that they know best.

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