A rough year: first a ransomware attack, then a credential stuffing attack affecting more than 1 million patients.

On April 28, NextGen submitted a breach notification to the Montana Attorney General’s Office. Thinking it would be a report linked to the ransomware attack by AlphV (BlackCat) in January, DataBreaches prepared to write an update. But it turned out that it was not that incident. It was a seemingly unrelated incident. NextGen, a business associate to medical professionals, reported that between March 29 and April 14, an unauthorized individual accessed “a limited set of electronically stored personal information.” The type of information involved included name, date of birth, address, and social security number. The total number of people affected was 1,049,375. Although the notification to patients doesn’t provide any additional details about the attack, external counsel for NextGen notified the state that the breach involved Unauthorized access to database stemming from use of stolen client credentials that appear to have been stolen from other sources or incidents unrelated to NextGen The threat actor had more than one million working credential pairs? Then why didn’t their notification to patients tell them that this was a credential stuffing attack and recommend that they change any and all passwords for any sites where they have reused credentials? Would that have been appropriate and helpful advice?