Are You Sick - Again!?

It is now hard to keep up with the medical ID information breaches. Here is the latest reported by the Associated Press and written up in a few (but not enough) newspapers and hardly reported by the electronic media at all.

• "New York (dbTechno) - A man, 38-year old Dwight McPherson of Brooklyn, has been charged with the identity theft of 40,000 patients at the New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. He managed to steal the information while working at the hospital.
• McPherson was arrested on Friday night in relation to the identity thefts. This came just after the investigation revealed that the criminal activity did take place.
• He used his power as an employee at the hospital to steal the information of 40,000 patients. He used the hospital’s computer registration system and gathered up their names phone numbers, as well as social security numbers over the course of the past five or six years.
• A spokesperson for the hospital has stated that they do not believe any patients have been victims of fraud due to this criminal activity."

Source: http://www.dbtechno.com/health/2008/04/13/man-charged-with-identity-theft-of-patients-at-ny-hospital/

So what is the hospital doing for the people who had their most precious information put at risk? They are "setting up a hotline and offering credit monitoring services!"

Yes, the usual BS that has been scripted by our friends in the legal profession for every case of data loss is once again trotted out by the PR department.

We remind our readers that it is IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL if ID theft has taken place until months or years after a data loss. the crooks are not clueless morons' and they will lay low until the heat is off, they will sell and trade the ID information on the criminal web services that have been set up for the commerce in illegal personal data, and financial monitoring alone is not sufficient because if they have enough personal information the criminals can sell it to create doubles of the legitimate victim, obtain drivers licenses, passports, start companies, etc.

So once again the sorry lesson is that all the advice to be careful with your wallet and purse, keep your computer clean of maleware and spyware, and so forth is good advice but it does nothing to protect you from other morons or criminals such as appears to be the case with this breach from selling YOU down the drain!

Is ID theft insurance and legal protection to counterattack these types of losses necessary?

I don't know but all I can say is that I, Dr Steffen Schmidt, has such protection.