PFC (professional finance company, Inc.) is a debt collection company headquartered in Colorado, the United States. It cooperates with “thousands of” institutions to deal with unpaid bills and outstanding balances of customers and patients. On July 1, the official press release admitted that the software had been ransacked continuously in the past few months, dating back to February this year at the earliest.
Although PFC is not well-known in the United States, it serves hundreds of American hospitals and medical institutions. Therefore, this blackmail attack may become the largest private and health information disclosure event in American history this year.
PFC said that the data leak would affect 650 medical providers. Hackers obtained the patient’s name, home address, outstanding settlement amount and other financial information. PFC said that some of the data also involved the patient’s date of birth, ID number, medical insurance, drug treatment and other information.
In a document submitted to the U.S. Department of health and human services, PFC confirmed that the blackmail software attack affected at least 1.91 million patients. At least two medical institutions using PFC system have data leaks, including 17481 patients in bayhealth medical center in Delaware, USA, and 1159 patients in bayhealth medical center in Texas.
Several media including techcrunch tried to contact Michael hoop, the CEO of PFC, but they were not recovered. Nick prola, the general consultant of the company, came forward to answer the questions of various media, but the answers were all public culture and refused to answer the designated questions of the media. These problems include why the company has not notified the affected medical service providers in the past four months and whether the stolen data has been encrypted.
Nowadays, the wave of cloud computing and big data has swept the world, and enterprises and governments are continuing to migrate to cloud platforms, including national key industries focusing on science and technology, finance, industrial manufacturing and government affairs, which are paying close attention to the layout of digitalization. With the widespread trend of “going to the cloud”, while bringing convenience to enterprises and governments, data security on the cloud is also challenged. No matter which industry, enterprises will generate data in production and operation.
According to the analysis and Research Report of IBM and Ponemon Institute based on more than 500 enterprises that have truly experienced data leakage in 17 countries around the world, the average cost of a single data leakage event of enterprises suffering from data leakage in 2021 was $4.24 million, an increase of 10% over 2020. With the diversity of hacker methods, the cost will increase exponentially in the future.
In addition to the loss of property, the loss caused by the loss of customer trust and the negative impact on the corporate image is even more difficult to estimate.
In the future, how to deal with such problems in the hotel industry has become the focus of the digital direction of the hotel group. How to build a firewall for data security? Can we actively monitor all aspects and conduct threat early warning analysis in advance? Both are urgent matters that should be considered in the industry.
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