Finish Medical Data Breach Disaster

Trust thought for the day - wow, breach of trust on an epic scale.

Another example of something that was widely predicted and seemingly not taken seriously enough. The repercussions of this are huge.

"In October of 2020, a startling email notification popped up on the phone of a Finnish college student named Jere. The subject line contained his own full name and social security number. It also included the name of a clinic where he had received mental-health treatment as a teenager, and where he had shared secrets with the potential to compromise future job prospects.

The clinic, Vastaamo, ran the largest network of private mental-health providers in Finland—and it had announced a massive and catastrophic data breach just a few days earlier. Now hackers were demanding hundreds of euros worth of Bitcoin from individual patients in exchange for not publishing their records.

The hack was especially shocking because Finland is widely considered a pioneer in digital health, wrote William Ralston last year. But “the Vastaamo scandal has highlighted the ‘unmet demand’ for electronic medical record systems that are scalable, easy to use, and—crucially—secure.”