Central Ohio Urology Group (COUG) recently suffered data breach. The incident may have exposed the information of patients, employees, and individuals who got the services from the facility. 
As per the statement, “We want to make affected individuals aware of steps they can take to guard against fraud or identify theft. Individuals can carefully check their credit reports for accounts they did not open or for inquiries from creditors they did not initiate, and should call the credit agency immediately if they see something they do not understand. Any suspicious activity on a credit report should be reported to the local police or sheriff’s office. When contacting law enforcement, individuals should file a police report for identity theft and get a copy of it, since it may be necessary to give copies of the police report to creditors to clear up fraudulent records.”
Affected information included names, addresses, telephone number(s), emails, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license/state identification numbers, patient identification numbers, medical and health plan information, account information, diagnoses or treatment information, health insurance information and identifiers, and employment-related information.
According to the reports, an unauthorized individual made the files and documents live on the internet. Online drive was accessible on August 2, 2016. As per the OCR data breach reporting tool, data of 300,000 individuals was breached.
COUG removed the information from the drive within hours and local law enforcement were contacted. Facility also hired a forensics firm to investigate the incident.
“We carefully reviewed the posted files and documents to determine what types of information had been put online and which individuals may have been affected,” the statement reads. “Additionally, we installed network monitoring software, implemented a new firewall, added access restrictions and began updating system protections to help prevent this type of incident from recurring in the future.”
One year of complimentary identity protection services to individuals is provided to the potentially affected individuals.
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