Illinois Department of Human Services breach hits more than 700K

Over 700,000 Illinois residents had their data inadvertently leaked by the state Department of Human Services for four years as a result of a misconfiguration that was only addressed in September, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future.

Aside from exposing names, addresses, and other protected health information belonging to over 32,400 disabled individuals served by the agency's Division of Rehabilitation Services since April 2021, IDHS's failure to properly secure internal planning maps for resource allocations also revealed addresses, public benefits statuses, and other PHI from 672,616 Medicaid and Medicare Savings Programs recipients across the state since January 2022.

Despite finding no evidence indicating that the exposed data was misused, officials have already moved to ban staff publication of customer-level information in public mapping platforms in a bid to prevent a recurrence. Such a development comes more than a year after IDHS disclosed that 1.1 million residents' data had been compromised in a phishing-related breach.