The Municipality of Walworth County is notifying those who may have been impacted by a privacy incident. Walworth County’s Department of Health and Human Services Director Carlo Nevicosi says an unknown third party accessed a small number of Walworth County employees’ email accounts through a phishing email. Nevicosi says upon learning the situation, they started an internal investigation, containing the incident and secured the accounts to prevent further access before hiring a forensic security firm to help them. He says for part of the investigation, all emails in the compromised accounts were reviewed for personal information. They determined an account contained personal information of around 1200 different people. Information contained in email accounts varied by individual but was mostly limited to names, being the extent of information breached. These little bits of information were mainly people’s names. They don’t believe the third party’s motive was to access patients’ personal information, but think it was likely they were looking for access to financial systems. He says they’re not, at this point, aware of fraud or identity theft instances that resulted of this incident. They’re mailing letters as part of their notification process.
Photo courtesy of Walworth County Wisconsin’s website.
