Cyber Attack on Health Employers Association of BC May Have Resulted in the Personal Data of Some Employees Being Stolen

A cyber attack on the Health Employers Association of BC may have resulted in the personal data of some employees being breached.

Discovered by the Association on July 13th, the attack focused on a server which hosted websites and application forms for three programs.

Those include: Health Match BC, the BC Care Aide and Community Health Worker Registry, and the Locums for Rural BC Program.

While the Association is certain not all data was taken from the servers, they have yet to verify exactly what data was stolen.

Information taken may include: personal e-mail addresses, birth dates, social insurance numbers, passport information, investigative reports, and more.

In total, the server stored a total of approximately 240,000 unique e-mail addresses and no miss-use of the data has been uncovered so far.

HEABC is notifying individuals which may have been impacted, and providing 2 years of identity and credit protection services with Equifax.

Upon discovering the attack, the Association immediately shutdown the servers before transferring all data to a clean server.

Some services for new users remain down while the Association works to re-establish them, though services for existing users are not impacted.

Health Minister Adrian Dix says the attack, which ran from May 9th to June 10th, did not impact public health records or government systems.