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Backup Tapes With 2 Million Medical Records Stolen

Posted by Soulskill on from the doctor-patient-thief-confidentiality dept.

Lucas123 writes "A vehicle used by an off-site archive company to transport patient data was broken into on March 17. The University of Miami just made the theft public last week, saying the thieves removed a transport case carrying the school's six computer backup tapes. On those tapes were more than 2 million medical records. In fact, the archive company waited 48 hours before notifying the university itself. A University spokeswoman said the school has stopped shipping backup tapes off-site for now."

2 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Hmm. by Ethanol-fueled · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From TFA:

    After learning about the data breach, the university contacted local computer forensics companies to see if data on a similar set of backup tapes could be accessed. Menendez said security experts at Terremark Worldwide Inc. "tried for days" to decode the data but could not because of proprietary compression and encoding tools used to write data to the storage tapes.

    Proprietary compression and encoding tools? the article reeks of FUD but proprietary technologies still aren't without their faults...but eh, it's not like they used this "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0", right?

  2. Re:*Still* no encryption?? by WaltBusterkeys · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You can probably Google the file extension or some information in the header to determine the format and/or software. Not everything is on Google. If we're talking tapes, we're probably talking old mainframe-level systems. That means the problem might even be at the level of accessing the tape at all. The data coming off the tape is still just a string of ones and zeroes to them.

    This isn't a question where they've got a file sitting on their desktop called "Data.abx" and all they need to do is figure out what program creates an ".abx" file. In all likelihood, there's an old custom or semi-custom mainframe system that wrote this to the tape that didn't format in FAT32. (Nor would it make sense to even both with a filesystem on this type of backup system -- you're not backing up files, you're backing up a database.) From looking at a stream of data dump, there's no way to immediately make sense of it. If there's no file headers, there's not as much of a clue as to where to start. It just looks like an endless string of hex (2 million records is a lot of data).

    Somehow I doubt that this is just an Access file, sorry. Or even a SQL dump. They're not complete idiots.