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Picture: 123RF/WELCOMIA.
Picture: 123RF/WELCOMIA.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is probing the cyberattack at Oracle that has led to the theft of patient data, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Earlier this month, Oracle alerted some healthcare customers that sometime after January 22, hackers accessed its servers and copied patient data to an outside location, the report said, adding that the hack was aimed at extorting multiple medical providers in the US.

The FBI declined to comment. Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The report said it was not clear how many patient records were breached and which healthcare providers were targeted.

Austin, Texas-based Oracle acquired the US healthcare IT company Cerner Corporation for $28bn in 2022, which bolstered the company’s involvement in the electronic health record sector and likely increased the number of healthcare clients on its cloud platform.

The purchase came with a $16bn contract with the US department of veterans affairs, which has seen highly publicised outages and legislator scrutiny, according to the report.

The company told customers the hackers accessed older Cerner servers, taking data that had not yet been shifted to Oracle’s cloud storage service, the report said.

Oracle said it became aware of the breach around February 20, according to the report.

Reuters

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