Health, financial, and education institutions took major hits this week in coordinated data breach attacks. PharMerica Credit Control Corporation, Retirement Clearinghouse, Whitworth University, and Bristol Community College were all victims of major breaches that resulted in significant data losses and some serious problems for the people involved. Massive companies are being hit by these breaches, and you should consider credit monitoring services for your own personal safety.

Whitworth University is a small private Christian university located in Spokane, Washington. The school manages information for more than 3,000 students each year, and all that data was put at risk when the school was hit by a ransomware attack. The unexpected attack caused the students to lose personal data and put them at serious risk of an identity theft attack. This university earns approximately $150 million in revenue annually and maintains a staff of over 720 people.

Retirement Clearinghouse is a financial services company that got its start in 2001 by the name of RolloverSystems first. This company helps businesses enable their employees to exchange their individual retirement savings accounts for company 401k accounts. This service helps keep employees more financially secure and results in better long-term retirement savings.

Credit Control Corporation, or CCC, is a Virginia-based company that offers debt collection solutions to different companies. The organization provides budget planning services, follows up with third-party insurance offers, handles cash flow improvement programs, and more. This business is made up of 25 individuals and generates approximately $7 million in revenue annually.

PharMerica is a huge service provider that works with many of the pharmacies and medical facilities in the United States today. The company offers its services to more than 2,500 facilities and over 3,100 pharmacies, and providing the data services to all those companies requires storing massive amounts of HIPAA-protected information. Unfortunately, this pharmaceutical services giant suffered a recent data breach compromising data for millions of different patients.

NextGen Healthcare is an Atlanta-based healthcare services company that helps hospitals and health practices manage health record data electronically. The company was founded in 1973 and manages data for millions of different patients throughout the United States. With so many patients relying on the same service, this company is a huge security vulnerability since it suffered from a major data breach.

Major data breaches seem to be occurring more and more frequently, and we have some huge names on the list of impacted companies this week, including the US Government, Toyota, and Intel. We were also concerned with services in our hospitals and our schools being breached, giving up patient, student, and teacher data in the process through the breach of companies like SchoolDude and NextGen Healthcare.

Inquisitive minds are curious and seek out new knowledge, asking questions that will receive detailed answers. Anyone who considers themselves inquisitive should avoid the “Dark Web” or approach with extreme caution. The Internet is more complex by the hour, with nearly two billion websites and growing, the average user accesses only about ten percent of this massive resource.

Over centuries, harassment has been rooted in the global human condition. Modern America continues to grapple with intimidation, sexual abuse, bullying, and much more, all of which have severe implications for the victims. Ignoring the root causes of one person maliciously targeting another as a lower part of society is morally wrong. Persistent and unwanted targeting has been inflamed in recent decades by the worsening of fundamental human rights.

SchoolDude is a cloud-based work management tool for school districts and other organizations throughout the United States. This software service is used by school employees and students to submit repair requests and manage those same requests. The software is used to handle serious repairs in schools all over, and it also manages some confidential data about employees. This information was just released in a serious data breach that included more than 3 million user accounts.