'Neither a malicious attack nor an authorized employee abusing their credentials is likely to be caught in the act.'
B.C.’s provincial public health information system and the citizens’ information it contains are vulnerable to malicious attacks or employee abuses, the province’s information and privacy commissioner says.
The commissioner said the system ‘entry gate’ is weak and the industry standard, multi-factor authentication for securing personal information is not universally required for system access. The commissioner said the investigation revealed that PHSA’s audit procedure for detecting malicious attacks and inappropriate use of the system is reactive only, generating reports for manual review after events occur.
“Investigators discovered that the PHSA does not check to see that all desktop environments that are required to protect themselves from attack actually do so, leaving the entire system vulnerable," he added. Earlier calls for safeguards In September, Canada’s federal, provincial, and territorial information and privacy commissioners and ombudspersons called on governments for a concerted effort across the health-care sector to modernize and strengthen privacy protections for sharing personal health information.
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