The number of personal records exposed in a data breach involving organ transplant patients has grown to 1.5 million.
The United Network for Organ Transplantation, a Richmond nonprofit that oversees organ transplants throughout the country, announced in December that 1.2 million records had been exposed.
Sometime after that announcement, UNOS updated the number of breached records on its website but did not issue a new announcement.
“As UNOS learned more about this software configuration error, we updated the number of potential patient records that authorized system users may have had access to in our testing environment,” said Anne Paschke, a spokesperson for UNOS.
UNOS has come under scrutiny in recent years for a number of issues, including its information technology. The federal government said it will split up the federal contract to manage organ transplantation, ending the monopoly UNOS has held since 1986.
The affected data includes Social Security numbers, dates of birth and medical procedure information. It did not include identifiers such as names and addresses. UNOS said it does not believe patient data was misused, and the data was not compromised by a cyber attack. It did not affect the matching or allocation of organs to patients.
UNOS has not said how many people could have obtained the records. The records were not available to the public as a whole – only other members of the transplant community.
In 2021, the White House’s United States Digital Services issued a report criticizing UNOS’ technological capabilities, calling them out of date. Too much information must be entered by hand, the report stated. It also claimed UNOS data was stored on servers on the premises, not in cloud computing, making it more vulnerable to lapses.
Today in sports history: Jan. 22
1960: Paul Pender beats Sugar Ray Robinson to capture world middleweight boxing title
1962: Jackie Robinson becomes first Black player to be elected in Baseball Hall of Fame
1973: George Foreman knocks out Joe Frazier to win world heavyweight title
1988: Mike Tyson knocks out Larry Holmes to retain his world heavyweight title
2006: Kobe Bryant scores 81 points, the second-highest total in NBA history
2006: Pittsburgh Steelers win third playoff road game to reach Super Bowl
2012: Patriots beat stunned Ravens in AFC championship after Billy Cundiff misses 32-yard field goal
2012: Lawrence Tynes kicks winning field goal in sudden-death OT to send Giants to Super Bowl
2017: Matt Ryan leads Falcons to Super Bowl with rout of Packers
2017: Tom Brady leads Patriots to Super Bowl with win over Steelers
2017: Nathan Chen, 17, becomes youngest men’s U.S. figure skating champion in 5 decades
Employees work at UNOS in Richmond in 2021. There are nearly 2,800 Virginians waiting for an organ transplant, according to UNOS and, each month, 25 die waiting for a transplant as of last month.