WELLINGTON: New Zealand’s health ministry will look into the cause of a cybersecurity breach of a privately owned website, which hosts medical records for roughly a third of the country’s population and what extra protections are needed, the government said Monday.
The review would assess how the hackers were able to gain access, investigate the data protections in place and recommend improvements, minister of health Simeon Brown said in a statement.
“Patient data is incredibly personal and whether it is held by a public agency or a private company, it must be protected to the highest of standards,” Brown said. “We must learn from this incident.”
The website, Manage My Health, is used by many health centres in New Zealand and allows patients and providers to access medical records, lab results, book appointments and order prescriptions.
Auckland-owned Manage My Health said in a statement that a cybersecurity incident on Dec 30 meant that health documents from roughly 6% to 7% of the 1.8 million registered users may have been compromised. The gaps that allowed unauthorised access are now fixed, it said.
New Zealand newspaper The Post reported that a US$60,000 ransom had been demanded to prevent the release of the documents.
