Wal-Mart’s online pharmacy announced a healthcare data breach. The incident was result of coding error in a software. It caused some customers to be able to view other customers’ data. According to the reports, a patient could see health information belonging to another patient who was also logged in at the same time. Wal-Mart believes that any of this information has not been misused. Also, it was not a hacking job. “We had a software coding error for a 72-hour period from February 15 to 18 that affected a limited group of online pharmacy customers,” said company spokesman Dan Toporek.
“We moved quickly to fix the issue once it was discovered.” Affected information included patient names, addresses, dates of birth, and prescription histories. No Social Security numbers or other sensitive billing information were disclosed. Wal-Mart officials reported that only about 5,000 patients were potentially affected during this breach. The company offered one year free credit monitoring services.
The error happened during the migration of servers and was not a hack, Toporek said. Fewer than 5,000 users were potentially affected, a small percentage of the number of people who logged in during the 72-hour period, he said.
Alertsec Xpress is used by organizations that have recognized the need to protect their information. Customers range from single-user sole traders and consultants to multinational companies with a large number of offices around the globe. Over 4 million users worldwide use Alertsec Xpress’s Check Point Full Disk Encryption.