One of the most private information, apart from the obvious, is a person’s medical record. We go to a doctor or physician for taking checkups or getting treated for an illness. We then trust the doctor to not share that information to other patients. And we know that Doctors have the utmost responsibility of keeping information for each and every one of their patents private. Also, it has to be said that very rarely does a Doctor reveal information about some patient publicly.
However, we know that technology can be a bad thing when it comes to privacy. This applies in the field of medicine as well because many technologies have been used nowadays. Since the hospitals have become advanced with technology, we can see everything online. But the downside to this is that it is easy for hackers also to access that information. Now, we have one such case where it is estimated that millions of patients’ private information are available publicly.
Well, this information contains records such as patient’s medical data such as X-rays, CT scans, MRIs as well as other things. According to a report, 187 servers in the U.S. were found without passwords and other security protocols. Therefore, medical records from those servers were easily accessible by basic web searches or with the help of software.
However, the problem is that those servers also have other records of patients too like their phone numbers, age, gender as well as even social security numbers. While this information is not something that you could use to hack any account, it is enough to scam people by making calls on behalf of a medical company. This leak appears to be caused by radiologist offices and other independent centres failing to meet the security standards and securing their servers. While the major hospitals are not found to be insecure in this department.