DEARBORN, Mich. -
A data breach on the campus of Beaumont Hospital Dearborn are putting patients on alert.
An employee, now fired, was caught syphoning sensitive patient information without permission then handing it over to someone working for a personal injury attorney.
It's unclear exactly what this law firm was doing with items like insurance information, patient's reason for treatment and maybe worst of all social security numbers.
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We're talking about around 1,200 patients caught up in this mess, their information now compromised. We're told they were treated within the Beaumont system from February 1, 2017 - October 22,, 2019.
All of those people have been informed they're at risk.
The Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission was the first to alert hospital officials. That group, a watchdog to maintain ethical law practices in the state.
A statement from the hospital says:
"Beaumont has also taken steps to improve internal procedures to identify and remediate future threats in order to minimize the risk of a similar incident in the future."
The health system is working with police to see if this former employee should be charged with a crime.
In this case or any other data breach some things to do right away: pull a free credit report, then put a freeze on your credit file, then put a fraud alert on there, so you're notified of any issues.