County of Kings, California, shared in a statement that a misconfiguration on their public web server has potentially left some COVID-19 data and individuals’ information exposed online.
Originally discovered back in November, the breach could have exposed information on COVID-19 cases provided to the County’s Public Health Department by the California Department of Public Health and County healthcare providers.
County of Kings launched an investigation, which detected that the breach was due to an error made by an external contractor.
“Through our investigation, we determined that the misconfiguration resulted from an error made by a thirdparty contractor and existed on the County’s public web server from February 15, 2021 until it was fully corrected on December 6, 2021,” the statement reads.
As of now, the government department does not exclude the possibility that some individuals’ data also ended up online as a result of the breach. That data could include names, dates of birth, addresses, and COVID-19 related information.
On January 21st, County of Kings started to send emails to potentially impacted individuals and established a toll-free incident response line.
It furtherly suggested that there is currently no reason to suspect misuse of the information, so no action is required by potentially affected individuals.
“To help prevent something like this from happening again, County of Kings is taking steps to further protect COVID-19 information,” the statement concludes.
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