VA Doctors Used Unsecure Yahoo Calendar to Store Patient Data
The Veteran Affairs Department ordered doctors to immediately stop using a Yahoo Calendar Application to store confidential data. Notifications of a possible security breach have been sent to nearly 900 affected patients, according to VA’s monthly report to Congress on Dec. 22.
The report called the breach as a "mishandling of electronic information," because doctors were storing patients’ medical information, such as full names, dates and types of surgery and the last four digits of Social Security numbers, for 878 patients.
Information security authorities at the Chicago Health Care System first discovered on Nov. 23 that four residents in the facility’s orthopedic department had been using Yahoo Calendar to maintain a calendar of patient medical data since July 2007. The data was protected by a single password that had never been changed in the past three years, the report said. Since a rotating series of residents over the past few years had access to that account it was unclear exactly how many people knew that password.
