A New Twist: EHR Extortion

Tuesday, August 14, 2012
When was the last time you thought of extortion? A celebrity lawsuit, perhaps? Now we have health record extortion in the health and human service field. In a case that just came to light, a small Illinois surgical practice had their internal server hacked. The hackers encrypted patients' health information and offered it back to the practice "for a ransom" (see the FierceEMR story, EHR hackers encrypt files, demand ransom). I call it EHR extortion.

Unlike the normal fear in hacking cases, there was no threat of exposing or using the information obtained for medical identity . . .