BY JACK DWECK
One year after a cyber attack hit the One Brooklyn Health hospital network, patients are looking for compensation for the network’s failure to keep their personal information safe and secure.
On November 19th, 2022, the One Brooklyn Health hospital network, which includes Interfaith Medical Center, Brookdale Medical Center, and Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, was caught in a cyber attack that caused an outage that lasted until the end of the year.. The outage shut down all computer systems as well as electronic medical records of patients.
The attack started a few months earlier, in July of 2022, when unknown hackers breached all of the hospitals’ patients’ personal information, including Social Security records, driver’s license numbers, financial account information and medical files. It was alleged that over 235,000 people had their info stolen by these hackers. The hospital system’s employees and their spouses were also affected.
According to a notice on OBH’s website, “an unauthorized actor acquired a limited amount of OBH data during a period of intermittent unauthorized access to OBH’s computer systems between July 9, 2022, and November 19, 2022.”
On April 26th, 2023, plaintiff Kiya Johnson filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against OBH, stating that the hospital system neglected to strengthen its system’s security. The plaintiff also said that she is struggling to protect herself against the misuse of her information, and she is even more at risk of identity theft in the future because of this.
“The buck stops with One Brooklyn Health,” said Shub & Johns LLC attorney Benjamin Johns in an interview with THE CITY. “They’re the entity that was entrusted with their own patient data. It’s 100% on them.”
“OBH deeply regrets any concerns this incident may cause patients and staff,” OBH said in an apology to their patients. “OBH takes this matter very seriously and will continue to take steps to enhance the security of systems and information OBH maintains to help prevent something like this from happening again.”
The lawyer and plaintiff hope the lawsuit will be classified as class-action, and are demanding a jury trial, damages, restitution, and injunctive relief.
OBH was contacted to comment on the situation, but failed to respond.
“We had our first in-person hearing in court last month,” said Johns. “The result of that was that all of the various cases that were filed against OBH were consolidated, and the court set a schedule for the filing of a single amended complaint.”
Johns went on to say that after the complaint is filed on December 15th, OBH will have an opportunity to respond to the plaintiffs’ allegations.