Chinese Hackers Stole Info on 4.5 Million U.S. Hospital Patients

If you’ve visited a hospital located in a rural area or region in the southeast of the United States in recent times, it’s advisable to keep tabs on your personal data.

Community Health Systems, a conglomerate operating 206 hospitals across 29 states predominantly in rural communities, declared today that it fell victim to a data breach compromising the personal details of around 4.5 million patients.

Stated in a regulatory filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the healthcare organization was subject to an attack between April and June of this year by an ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’ group allegedly situated in China.

Community Health has yet to establish the primary objective of this assault, even though it is certain that “non-medical patient identification data linked to the Company’s physician practice operations and impacted approximately 4.5 million people who, over the last five years, were recommended for or provided services from physicians associated with the Company.”

The term ‘Advanced Persistent Threat’ gained prominence last year when security company Mandiant used it to identify a unit of the Chinese Army suspected of perpetrating network attacks on a considerable number of American, Canadian, and British firms, going back to 2006. The operation was meticulously documented in a groundbreaking report.

Upon detecting the breach, Community Health contracted Mandiant, a division of security firm FireEye, to probe the incident. It remains uncertain if Mandiant links this particular incident to the same Chinese Army unit previously implicated or whether it is a distinct group in China adopting similar methods. The security firm remained unresponsive to requests for a statement.

Mandiant’s report last year exposed the activities of Unit 61398, a military cyberwarfare unit alleged to have targeted the networks of at least 141 companies or organizations. On average, the intruders were observed to spend nearly a year within a targeted company’s systems pilfering sensitive data: Product creation blueprints, manufacturing methods, business strategies, and even the email exchanges of high-ranking executives. This is assumed to be an effort to boost China’s competitiveness.

China has officially refuted these accusations, yet the report was so comprehensive that the U.S. Department of Justice issued criminal indictments for five members of Unit 61398, thereby exacerbating existing tensions between the U.S. and China regarding the contentious issue of cyber warfare.

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This article was updated in 2025 to reflect current trends and insights.