North Shore Breach

New York-based North Shore-LIJ Health System is notifying roughly 18,000 patients that five laptop computers – four of which contained their personal information – were stolen in September 2014 from the offices of Global Care Delivery (GCD), a Texas-based contractor.

How many victims? Roughly 18,000.

What type of personal information? Names, dates of birth, internal account numbers, diagnosis and procedure codes, and insurance identification numbers. Social Security numbers were included for about 2,000 patients.

What happened? Five laptop computers containing personal information on North Shore-LIJ patients were stolen from the offices of GCD, a Texas-based contractor.

What was the response? Law enforcement has been notified. All impacted individuals are being notified, and offered free identity theft protection services.

Details: GCD staff members discovered on Sept. 2, 2014, that five laptop computers were missing from the GCD office. GCD notified North Shore-LIJ on May 11. The laptops were password protected, but not encrypted, and have not been recovered. The personal information related to patients who had one or more visits to North Shore-LIJ between March 2013 and September 2014.

Quote: `Although neither GCD nor North Shore-LIJ are aware of any access or misuse of the data, they strongly encourage individuals to remain alert to potential harm by obtaining a credit report from one of the major credit reporting agencies and monitoring any accounts for unauthorized activity,` according to a notification posted to the North Shore-LIJ website

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