Patients Information Exposed

October 21, 2008 – 3:20 pm

Hospital patients of Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA have been exposed to Identity theft. A man was using the hospital’s online registration system when he accidentally found the files of 803 patients. The hospital is claiming that the data breach is an anomaly and that the man was the only one to find the files and he only opened two of them and didn’t copy or print any of the information.

Rebecca and Gary Dennison had contacted the police after a man known only as “Mike” called her one night and said that he had seen her private information on the Medicorp website. The man was able to tell her her social security number, phone number, address, insurance carrier,birth date and doctors name. This of course was very disturbing to Rebecca and after telling her husband he called the police to investigate investigate.

Apparently when “Mike” went online to register his wife, who was pregnant, using Medicorp’s website it apparently was not working properly. At one point he got an error message and when he modified the sites url he found records of 803 people who had registered using the site since Dec 27, 2007.

Even though the Hospital claims that only one person had seen the information on the site there is now way of really knowing. Even though, there was only one guy that reported it, it doesn’t mean that he was the only one that saw it. These kinds of data breaches are just the reason that having someone protecting your identity is a must. LifeLock is the leader in identity theft protection. If you would like a LifeLock membership but don’t want a discount use our LifeLock promotion code, Defense.

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