New York public well being supplier NYC Well being and Hospitals says a months-long data breach that allowed hackers to steal private information, medical information, and fingerprints scans impacts at the very least 1.8 million folks.
NYCHHC is the biggest public well being system in america and gives healthcare to over one million New Yorkers, nearly all of whom are uninsured or obtain state healthcare advantages, reminiscent of Medicaid.
The healthcare system reported the quantity to the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Providers, making it one of many largest healthcare-related data breaches of the yr to date. Healthcare organizations have been repeatedly focused by financially motivated cybercriminals lately in efforts to steal their huge banks of extremely delicate sufferers’ private, medical, and billing info.
In a data breach discover on its web site, NYCHHC mentioned that it detected a cyberattack on February 2 and secured its community. The hackers had entry to its community from November 2025 till February 2026, throughout which the hackers copied recordsdata from its techniques.
The healthcare system mentioned hackers broke as a consequence of a breach at a third-party vendor, which it didn’t identify.
NYCHHC mentioned that the uncovered information varies by particular person, and consists of sufferers’ medical insurance plan and coverage info, medical info (reminiscent of diagnoses, drugs, assessments, and imagery), billing, claims, and cost info. Different government-issued identification paperwork, reminiscent of Social Safety numbers, passports, and driver’s licenses, have been additionally compromised.
The breach discover additionally says “exact geolocation information” was taken within the breach, suggesting that the user-uploaded pictures of their identification paperwork might have additionally contained the precise location of the place the doc was captured.
The breach is especially delicate as a result of hackers stole biometric info, together with fingerprints and palm prints, which affected people have for all times and can’t change. NYCHHC didn’t present an evidence for storing biometric information. Potential NYCHHC workers are usually required to enroll their fingerprints for legal information checks. It’s not but recognized if sufferers’ biometrics have been additionally taken.
NYCHHC’s web site was briefly offline as of Monday morning. A spokesperson for NYCHHC didn’t instantly reply to an e mail from information.killnetswitch with questions concerning the cyberattack. information.killnetswitch requested, amongst different issues, why it took the group months to detect the breach, and if it has acquired any communication from the hackers, reminiscent of a requirement for cost.
It’s not clear if NYCHHC can obtain e mail on the time of the web site outage.
The incident seems to be unrelated to the data breach at Nationwide Affiliation on Drug Abuse Issues (NADAP) earlier this yr, by which over 5,000 NYCHHC sufferers had info taken within the cyberattack.
Within the FBI’s newest annual report on cybercrime masking 2025, healthcare remained a high goal for ransomware attackers — criminals who break into databases, steal a replica of the info whereas scrambling the sufferer’s servers, and threaten to publish the stolen information if the sufferer doesn’t pay the hackers. A ransomware assault on UnitedHealth-owned well being tech big Change Healthcare allowed Russian-linked hackers to steal the medical and billing info of greater than 190 million Individuals, believed to be the biggest theft of U.S. medical information in historical past.
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