Skip to main contentAvamere Health Services LLC has told clients that hackers breached the senior care company’s computer system earlier this year, potentially obtaining Social Security numbers and financial and medical information about clients.
“We recently determined that intermittent unauthorized access to a third-party hosted network utilized by Avamere occurred between Jan. 19, 2022, and March 17, 2022,” the company said in a statement.
A health care industry publication, HIPAA Journal, reported additional details.
“The exact nature of the cyberattack was not disclosed in the substitute breach notice, but it would appear that this was a ransomware attack and that the exfiltrated data has been published on the group’s data leak site,” HIPAA Journal reported.
“Avamere Health Services has reported the breach to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights as affecting 197,730 individuals and has now sent notifications to those individuals and has offered complimentary credit monitoring.”
Now headquartered in Wilsonville, Avamere was founded in 1995 in Hillsboro by Rick Miller and has expanded to include 300 facilities of various kinds in 20 states.
Miller, who stands about 7 feet tall, has played a towering civic and political role in Oregon, serving on the Oregon Investment Council and chairing the board of his alma mater, Portland State University, among many other positions. In 2012, he bought the former Jantzen estate, a landmark 5.5-acre private island in Lake Oswego. After restoring the stone manor house, he sold it in 2021, and listed a Ketchum, Idaho, address in a recent $5,000 donation to Tina Kotek, the Democratic nominee for governor.
Once a generous GOP donor, Miller flirted with running for legislative seats in the past decade and also considered a run for governor. More recently has dialed back his political involvement after stepping back in to the CEO’s position at Avamere in 2018.
Avamere said it has learned a lesson from the breach: “Since the incident, our information technology department and external security experts have reviewed and enhanced our systems to reduce the chance of a similar event from occurring in the future.”