The Hawaii Department of Health (DOH) has started sending out notifications about a data breach resulting in the compromise of roughly 3,400 death records.
In January, the DOH says, it was informed that an external medical certifier account on the DOH Electronic Death Registry System (EDRS) was compromised and that the associated login credentials were being traded on hacker forums.
According to DOH, “the account belonged to a medical certifier at a local hospital who had left employment in June 2021, but whose account had not been deactivated.”
Using the compromised credentials, threat actors accessed the EDRS in January 2023 and accessed roughly 3,400 death records with dates of death ranging between 1998 and 2023.
Most of the deaths occurred in 2014 or earlier, and almost all of them had been certified before the intrusion. For those that had not been certified, DOH’s investigation found no evidence of tampering.
Information included in those records includes names, addresses, birth dates, sex, dates and places of death, cause of death, and Social Security numbers.
“No death certificates were accessed, nor were any able to be generated. However, out of an abundance of caution, DOH encourages affected parties to remain vigilant about any remaining unsettled matters such as accounts, estate, life insurance claim or Social Security survivor benefits,” DOH says.
The department is sending notification letters to surviving spouses or those individuals who reported the death to the mortuary.
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