Yreka, Calif.-based Fairchild Medical Center began notifying patients Nov. 25 of a misconfiguration on one of its servers that might have allowed unauthorized individuals access to patient data for about 4.5 years.
A third-party security company unaffiliated with FMC alerted the medical center to the security issue in July; FMC then launched an investigation and hired computer specialists to secure the server.
FMC determined that the misconfiguration existed from around Dec. 16, 2015, to July 31, 2020. The medical center said it cannot rule out unauthorized access to patient records that were present on the server during the time period.
Patient data contained on the server includes names, medical images, dates of birth, identification numbers and ordering providers.