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 data, and fingerprints scans impacts a minimum of 1.8 million folks.
NYCHHC is the most important public well being system in america and offers healthcare to over a million New Yorkers, the vast majority of whom are uninsured or obtain state healthcare advantages, akin to Medicaid.
The healthcare system reported the quantity to the U.S. Division of Well being and Human Companies, making it one of many largest healthcare-related information breaches of the 12 months thus far. 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 data.
In a knowledge 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 programs.
The healthcare system mentioned hackers broke on account 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 data, medical data (akin to diagnoses, drugs, assessments, and imagery), billing, claims, and fee data. Different government-issued id paperwork, akin to 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 id 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 data, together with fingerprints and palm prints, which affected people have for all times and can’t exchange. NYCHHC didn’t present a proof for storing biometric information. Potential NYCHHC workers are usually required to enroll their fingerprints for prison data checks. It’s not but identified 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 TechCrunch with questions concerning the cyberattack. TechCrunch requested, amongst different issues, why it took the group months to detect the breach, and if it has obtained any communication from the hackers, akin to a requirement for fee.
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 info breach at Nationwide Affiliation on Drug Abuse Issues (NADAP) earlier this year, by which over 5,000 NYCHHC sufferers had data taken within the cyberattack.
Within the FBI’s newest annual report on cybercrime masking 2025, healthcare remained a prime goal for ransomware attackers — criminals who break into databases, steal a duplicate 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 information of more than 190 million Americans, believed to be the most important theft of U.S. medical information in historical past.
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