Toyama Japan Hospital, 2,800 patients, file sharing
Information on about 2,800 patients who had surgery at a privately-run hospital in Toyama between 1997 and December 2004 was unintentionally uploaded to the Internet.
According to the hospital, the man in charge of data on surgery transferred the information–consisting of patients’ names, sexes, birthdates and information on surgical procedures for which they were hospitalized–to his personal computer, which was infected with a virus that compromised the data.
The data manager had been using the Winny file-sharing program on his computer. (From Yomiuri Shimbun [http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/national/20060309TDY02002.htm no longer works]