Another cyber breach as potentially damaging as that of the infamous hook-up site for married users, Ashley Madison, 15 years ago has recently come to light that could have equally serious consequences.
According to a notification filed this month with the California Department of Justice, the sperm bank California Cryobank reports a breach that occurred last April. Stolen files include the names, social security numbers, driver’s license numbers, financial accounts, and health insurance information of many of the sperm bank donors and their recipients.
For a fee of US$70,000, Cryobank supplies potential parents with five vials of a selected donor’s sperm, allowing up to nine other families to access to that donor’s sperm. The breach means that the anonymity of the sperm donors of the families can no longer be guaranteed, with potentially devastating consequences for the families involved and the donors themselves.
This potentially not only leaves them open to blackmail but also facing further complications should their children wish to contact their real father. It also leaves the door open for cyber espionage in the case of families and donors who may occupy influential positions. As Cyber Intelligence reported last month, healthcare cyber espionage has now become a national security threat in the US, as the sector is now no longer considered off-limits by organized cybercriminal gangs and potentially hostile nation-state-backed threat actors.
“Healthcare’s share of posts on data leak sites has doubled over the past three years, even as the number of data leak sites tracked by Google Threat Intelligence Group has increased by nearly 50% year over year. The impact of these attacks means that they must be taken seriously as a national security threat, no matter the motivation of the actors behind it,” says Search engine giant Google.
Google Threat Intelligence Group also reports that cybercriminal and state-backed cyber-attacks on the healthcare sector in countries such as the US and UK have escalated to a level where they are actually costing lives.
The consequences leading to the Cryobank heist have yet to be reported, but in the case of the Ashley Madison hook-up site, the consequences reportedly included the suicides of some users.
