Bellarine Medical Group patients receive malicious emails from hackers

A Bellarine Peninsula clinic is warning patients not to open a suspicious email that was sent by hackers.

Bellarine Medical Group’s emails were hacked on Friday, with patients receiving a suspicious PDF file.

A medical clinic in Drysdale has been targeted by hackers, with a patient voicing concerns not everyone would recognise the signs of a scam.

The email, purportedly from Bellarine Medical Group, stated the group was sending a file through an external file sharing resource, Smash, which is a “magical new way to send (super) big files” and the receiver could download them in “total safety”.

The clinic failed to respond to requests for comment by deadline.

A Bellarine Medical Group patient, who wished to remain anonymous, said he received an email that appeared to have come from the medical group about 11.30am on Friday.

He said it had a PDF attachment that he was able to view without downloading it.

“It was clearly malicious,” he said.

“You find it's a pretty common way hackers do this and have done to other medical groups before.

“If you were to download the PDF, within that there’s a link and it will say ‘click this link to download the document’ and if you click it, it will give them access to your computer.

“By the looks of it if you were to do it through your computer they would have backdoor access so for example they would be able to be in your system without you seeing it and do whatever they want to do.”

Bellarine Medical Group wrote an urgent alert on its social media and website on Friday, which read, “unfortunately our emails have been hacked”.

“Please note that this is an issue with our emails only and not our clinical software or patient information,” the post stated.

“We’re currently doing our best to fix this issue and apologise for any inconvenience.”

The post included an image of the email and asked patients not to open any emails that looked similar from the medical group.

The patient said he called the group as soon as he received the email and realised what it was.

He said they told him not to open it and that the issue was resolved.

“It doesn’t look like the typical spam that goes to your junk mail, it was in my main inbox,” he said.

He said he had never received an email from them before and it was obvious to him it was malicious but he was concerned not everyone would realise.

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s Notifiable Data Breaches Report: January to June 2024 showed the number of data breaches notified to the regulator was at its highest in three and a half years.

There were 527 notifications of breaches and 102 were in the health sector, the highest of any sector by more than 30.

The highest source behind the data breaches was malicious or criminal attack, at 67 per cent.

Originally published as Bellarine Medical Group patients receive malicious emails from hackers