The Hackerdose team has made an interesting discovery, revealing a significant data breach on a dark web forum marketplace.
We have encountered a post claiming that it includes the personal information of more than 5 million doctors who live in the United States.
The data leak includes 4 million physicians and 1.4 million surgeons, which poses a significant risk to the medical and healthcare community.
The leaked database contains a wealth of personal information, including names, email addresses, mobile numbers, home addresses, city, postal codes, affiliated organizations, identification numbers, and the specific type of medical practice.
In January 2024, Statista released a report stating that there are 1,100,101 professionally active physicians in the United States. Based on this figure, the potential data breach could have a substantial impact on the healthcare industry, potentially compromising a large portion of the nation's medical professionals.
“If this extensive database is indeed authentic, it presents a great risk to almost half of the country's active physicians.” quoted, one researcher.
The individual responsible for this leak has shared a sample of the data, containing lines of information that are said to be from the compromised database.
Nevertheless, the origins and method of this extensive breach are still unknown, which leads to inquiries about the source and scope of the data leak.
At the moment, there is limited information regarding the cause of this breach or the vulnerabilities that led to the compromise of a significant amount of sensitive data.
Given the magnitude of the leak, it is extremely unlikely that a breach of this nature could have gone unnoticed.
Given the timespan, there are notable incidents where the healthcare industry was attacked by threat actors. Notably, the ransomware attack in February on Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group.
With this development, healthcare professionals face the risk of personal information exposure, which could lead to targeted attacks that have the potential to disrupt their personal and professional lives.
However, the credibility of the data leak is still being questioned. Even with the sample provided, there are doubts about the accuracy of the claimed number of compromised individuals, which is the sheer number of 5 million doctors.