TORONTO, Oct. 06, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Waddell Phillips PC, Schneider Law Firm PC, and Howie Sacks & Henry LLP have commenced a proposed class action on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Ontarians whose personal information was compromised in the 2018 CarePartners privacy breach.
CarePartners has an estimated 237,000 patients across Ontario, and is a home healthcare service provider partner of the Local Health Integration Network provincial health authorities.
On June 18, 2018, CarePartners announced that it had been subject to a hack and privacy breach involving employee and patient information. Subsequently, the cyber attackers who claimed responsibility for the hack announced that they had been able to steal virtually all of the data on CarePartners’ servers, including full employee records and medical files for CarePartners patients. They claimed that CarePartners was utilizing vulnerable software that had not been updated in years, and had failed to encrypt any of the data on their servers.
The claim alleges that CarePartners did not notify its patients about the breach until after a national news broadcast revealed that the hackers had provided reporters with stolen copies of private health records for thousands of CarePartners’ patients.
Cyber attacks on healthcare providers have become increasingly common. The need to be hyper-vigilant and to ensure that security measures are current is the expected standard.
“That none of the data extracted by the cyber attackers was encrypted demonstrates just how unprepared CarePartners was to meet the bare minimum of cyber security standards. Consistently updated information protection tools, including strong encryption, are essential in today’s rapidly evolving technological world,” said Cary Schneider, a founding partner at Schneider Law Firm PC and cyber breach specialist.
“Personal health information is the most sensitive type of personal information, and corporations that store personal health information must meet correspondingly high privacy protection standards. CarePartners failed to do that, and its patients and employees paid the price,” says Paul Miller, a partner at Howie Sacks & Henry LLP who specializes in class actions and mass torts.
The class action team is being led by Margaret Waddell, founding partner of Waddell Phillips PC, who is recognized by multiple lawyer ranking agencies as a leader in plaintiff-side class actions, and has acted as class counsel on a number of prominent cases. Waddell says, “In our opinion, CarePartners’ lack of transparency regarding the breach and the efforts it has made to retrieve and protect its clients’ most sensitive health information is egregious. Clients have a right to know what has happened to their health records, and why they were not properly protected.”
Further information regarding the proposed class action will be posted as it becomes available at https://waddellphillips.ca/class-actions/carepartners-class-action.
Contact:
Tina Q Yang
Waddell Phillips PC
(647) 847-2294
tina@waddellphillips.ca