Virginia prescription drug patient data stolen by hackers

Posted on May 05, 2009

Prescription data maintained by the state of Virginia was allegedly stolen by hackers last week. The data, maintained on a website that can be accessed by pharmacists to track prescription drug abuse, is being ransomed for $10 million. The security breach was discovered by the state on April 30^th.

The hackers deleted over 8 million patient records and replaced the homepage of the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program website with a ransom note. The note stated that the hackers had a backup copy of the data that they had encrypted, and the original had been deleted. The $10 million ransom would be in exchange for a password to the encrypted copy of the data.

The incident is being investigated by federal and state authorities, and the FBI is fielding all inquiries about the matter. The prescription drug website, in addition to other sites related to the Virginia Department of Health Professionals, is offline.

The Virginia health websites are expected to be offline until experts can confirm that all security holes have been plugged and that the data to which they allow access is safe and secure.

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