We have talked about the various types of insider threats – accidental or malicious – at great length and here is a prime example of just how weird things can get when an employee decides to abuse privilege.
Juliah Kechil, a former healthcare assistant at Royal Liverpool university hospital has been fined and also ordered to pay a sum toward prosecution costs after she unlawfully accessed the medical records of five members of her ex-husband’s family in an effort to obtain their new telephone numbers. Now we could speculate about what went so wildly wrong that she was cut off from all forms of communication, and let’s be honest it could be fun to spin a tale, starting with out-of-hand fights and ending with the husband entering the witness protection program. The reality is probably much more boring, but the end result of her snooping through medical records for phone numbers is a complete abuse of privilege, and a little stalkerish.
The hospital was led to launch an investigation when the defendant’s former father-in-law contacted the hospital after receiving nuisance calls, which he suspected had been made by Kechil. Upon further investigation, the hospital learned she had no work related reason to access their records. The breaches were traced through audit trails linked to the defendant’s smartcard ID.
You can’t rely on your employees to always do the right thing, which is why having the right privilege access in place is critical.
