October 21, 2022
Advocate Aurora Health (AAH), a health care system with 26 hospitals in Wisconsin and Illinois, has confirmed a data breach caused by the improper use of Meta Pixel on AAH’s websites. The data breach exposed the personal information of 3,000,000 patients.
Meta Pixel is a JavaScript tracker that helps website operators understand how visitors interact with security and help them make targeted improvements.
Some of the information that may have come to the public via Meta Pixel include IP address; dates, times and locations of scheduled appointments; proximity to an AAH location; medical provider information; type of appointment or procedure; communication between MyChart users, which may have included first and last names and medical record numbers; insurance information and proxy account information.
The healthcare provider has disabled the Pixel tracker on all systems and is introducing protective measures to prevent a similar form of exposure from occurring.
As a security measure, patents are advised to use tracker blocking in their web browser or to use incognito mode when logging on to medical portals. Users with a Facebook or Google account are advised to review their privacy settings.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.
