Wyoming Department of Health data compromised

The Wyoming Department of Health says there has been a mistaken exposure of laboratory test results involving the health information of thousands of Wyoming residents and others.

The department became aware of a breach involving protected health information on March 10^th when it was discovered that a workforce member inappropriately handled the information of approximately 164,021 Wyoming residents and others as early as November 5^th.

 The incident involves an unintentional exposure of 53 files containing COVID-19 and influenza test results and one file containing breath alcohol test results. These files were mistakenly uploaded by a Public Health workforce member to private and public online storage locations on servers belonging to GitHub.com.

These affected files did NOT contain social security numbers, or banking, financial or health insurance information. The files have been removed from the GitHub repositories and GitHub has destroyed any dangling data from their servers.

Business practices at the Health Department have been revised to include prohibiting the use of GitHub or other public repositories, and employees have been retrained.