UPDATED 09:50 EDT / AUGUST 25 2014

Millions of patients’ data hacked in “first confirmed” Heartbleed heist

heartbleed blame game grafitti artCommunity Health Systems (CHS) Inc. has become the latest U.S. institution to come forward about falling victim to Chinese hackers after admitting in an SEC filing last week that personally identifiable information about millions of patients was stolen over the course of two separate attacks in April and June.

An investigation conducted on behalf of the hospital giant by FireEye Inc. subsidiary Mandiant has concluded that the level of sophistication and modus operandi behind the breaches points to an “Advanced Persistent Threat” group based in China, according to the document. The firm, which rose to prominence in 2013 after directly implicating the People’s Liberation Army in a separate case of cyberespionage, conceded that intellectual proprietary is typically the target in these kinds of attacks but nonetheless stands by its findings.

CHS said that the intruders had gotten away with data belonging to as many 4.5 million patients who have gone through its system in the past five years. The company divulged that the stolen trove contained names, addresses, social security numbers and all manner of other sensitive details but claimed an internal examination “confirmed” no credit card or medical information fell into the hands of the attackers, which should come as some relief to the affected users.

The filing doesn’t disclose much more that, but a blog post from TrustedSec LLC published a day after the breach fills in some of the gaps. The security consultancy cites a “trusted and anonymous source close to the CHS investigation” as saying that the hackers exploited the notorious Heartbleed vulnerability in the widely-used OpenSSL cryptography to compromise a device from Juniper Networks Inc. used in the company’s IT environment. The bug allowed the assailants to successfully lift login credentials for CHS’s virtual private network (VPN) off the appliance, TrustedSec goes on to write, and the rest was cake from there.

The firm points to the incident as the first confirmed breach where Heartbleed was used as the initial attack vector, but ominously adds that “there are sure to be others out there.” If its data is accurate, then we can expect the now supposedly “mostly fixed” Heartbleed to continue making headlines in the coming weeks and months.

photo credit: id-iom via photopin cc

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU