MediSecure Hack - Half The Australian Population Affected
The Australian Government has been told that the personal health data of almost 13 million individual users has been exposed in a hack that took place 3 months ago. MediSecure is a nationwide service which enables prescriptions to be delivered from prescribers to a pharmacy of an individual patient's choice.
Almost half of the the population have been affected by the exploit, which includes prescription history and other personal healthcare data.
MediSecure has published a public notice on the nature and extent of the incident and has restored a backup of the server. The affected data relates to prescriptions distributed by MediSecure’s systems up until November 2023. MediSecure entered voluntary administration not long after the attack was first disclosed.
Until late 2023, MediSecure was one of two prescription delivery services operating nationally.In May 2023 the Australian Government finalised a tender for this service, awarded exclusively to another company, Fred IT Group’s eRx Script Exchange (eRx). The national prescription delivery service, eRx, is not affected by this cyber incident. Consumers can continue to access medicines safely, and healthcare providers can still prescribe and dispense as usual says the government.
Prescriptions continue to work as normal. People should keep accessing their medications and filling their prescriptions. This includes prescriptions (paper and electronic) that may have been issued up until November 2023.
The affected data relates to prescriptions distributed by MediSecure’s systems before 2024 and a range of details associated with prescriptions has been compromised. MediSecure’s analysis of the data has confirmed that the kinds of information impacted by this incident includes contact and health information.
The Australian healthcare sector is the target of various malicious online activity, most notably an attack on medical insurance business, Medibank, which revealed that it suffered AU$26.2 million (£14.7 million) in cyber crime-related costs following the hack of its systems in the second half of 2022.
Mediscure | Austarila.gov | 9News | AMA | ABC | ITPro | RACGP
Image: Rodion Kusaiev
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