Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/07/05/medicare-machine.html
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cough George Pell, June 8, 1941 cough
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Your post says that the full health records are available from the Darknet, however the Guardian article discusses buying Medicare card details only. The two are not the same, and (according to Minister for Health) you can’t access full e-health records just with Medicare card details. I think your post has misrepresented what has happened somewhat.
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Doesn’t look like this is hacking in the <whine>“actually, the term you’re looking for is cracker”</whine> sense, but someone that already has access to the database selling off information.
Our human services minister claimed here here:
“The advice that I’ve received from my chief information officer … is that this isn’t a cybersecurity attack as such, but is more a traditional criminal activity … This means that someone hasn’t hacked into a database,” he said.
Meanwhile, Turnbull’s push for single-point-of-failure backdoor access to all internet encryption (because nobody in the public service would ever sell their access privileges for money) continues.
There are many external applications which hook into the federal health system and most of them will store medicare numbers. Its possible that the numbers have been leaked through one of those apps.
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Yeah, isn’t it all being aggregated through the mygov website? Which includes medicare and centrelink details? The medicare details are linked to, for example, my medical records at my gp’s - everything ever prescribed to me (for as long as I’ve been going there, obviously), treatment plans, medical history…
So unlike the poster above, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say medical records are available on the darkweb. They are, though technically through Medicare numbers, rather than directly.
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