Michigan Medicine says 56k+ patients affected by cyberattack

(FOX 2) - The health care system Michigan Medicine has informed tens of thousands of people of a cyberattack that impacted employee email accounts and potentially exposed patient information.

The University of Michigan-affiliated hospital said the intrusion happened between May 23-29. It could not determine if the goal of the breach was to obtain patient health information. However, it could not rule out data theft was the objective.

Three Michigan Medicine employee accounts were compromised due to the attack - and were disabled as soon as the hospital chain learned of the breach. The IP address of the individual behind the attack was also blocked while passwords were changed.

An analysis of the breach took place between June 10-27, according to Michigan Medicine. They found some emails that were compromised included attachments with patient and insurance information, as well as job-related communications for payment and billing.

No credit card, debit card, or bank account numbers were included in the compromised email accounts, the hospital system said. However, the social security numbers of four patients were involved. More than 56,000 patients were potentially impacted by the breach.

The hospital system, which includes U-M Medical School and University of Michigan Health, says its strengthening its existing processes for employee password and email security.

They added the breach was not related to last week's CrowdStrike outage.

"Michigan Medicine immediately took steps to investigate this matter, once alerted to the possibility of patient data being exposed. We constantly monitor for cyberattacks such as these because patient privacy is so extremely important to us," said Jeanne Strickland, Michigan Medicine Chief Compliance Officer.

Earlier this year, a separate cyberattack affected the Ascension hospital system. Hackers gained access to the health care chain's systems after an employee clicked on a malicious file.

Michigan Medicine says they notified affected patients starting July 19. Anyone concerned with their data being leaked can contact the assistance line at 1-888-409-7484.