Your Medical History Leaked from the Medical Cloud"--The Medical and Ethical Crisis Caused by Information Leaks (Late 2010s)

Your Medical History Leaked from the Medical Cloud"--The Medical and Ethical Crisis Caused by Information Leaks (Late 2010s)

This incident occurred in the late 2010s. The "cloud computing" and "sharing of electronic medical records" were progressing in the medical field, and the construction of "regional medical coordination networks" was in full swing in many countries, enabling patients to instantly check their medical history no matter which hospital they visited. It was becoming the norm for all medical data to be "stored on the network.

However, in exchange for this convenience, extremely sensitive personal data such as medical information was exposed to "places with little technical or institutional protection. In this incident, a medium-sized medical cloud provider was targeted by an external cyber attack that gained unauthorized access to a central database of patient information used by hospitals across the country.

A particular problem was that each hospital was using the same login ID system and security measures had been left "unchanged from the standard password". As a result, a single breach allowed dozens of medical institutions and millions of personal medical histories, prescription records, and even genetic test results to be extracted like a hot potato.

This was further compounded by reports that some of the leaked data ended up in the hands of insurance companies, which used it to calculate risk scores for policyholders, raise premiums, and deny policies. This highlighted the ethical issue of "confidential medical records being used for commercial risk management," and raised a major alarm about the relationship between healthcare and big data.

At the time, legal systems related to the medical cloud differed greatly from country to country. In the United States, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) was in place, but its effectiveness was not sufficient, and in Europe, the treatment of medical information under the GDPR diverged from practice. In many countries, there was an atmosphere of "accident = no choice" rather than "information leak = penalty," and companies' responses were merely formal.

This incident was one that impressed upon the public that information is not "property" but a "risk asset. Patients know their own bodies, but they cannot even get their own data back. This reality was visualized as a "real fear" for the first time for many people.

After this, many countries have been promoting stricter encryption, access control, and anonymization of medical data, but even so, once the information has been leaked, it cannot be recovered. We live in an era in which technological progress is protecting people's health and lives, but at the same time, that technology can also be used as a "weapon. This incident has been passed down to posterity as an event that symbolizes both sides of the coin.