New York State Psychiatric Institute Data Breach (2016)

For one week in late April and early May, a hacker (or hackers) got into servers that held information provided by 22,000 people for 11 mental health studies being done at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. These were not patients being treated at the institute, but subjects of its research. They included, among others, schoolchildren directly exposed to the events of Sept. 11; Puerto Rican youth; severely emotional disturbed young people in Westchester County and their caretakers; people in the Bronx suffering from post-traumatic stress who have family in the criminal justice system; students at three schools in Queens and four others in Washington Heights, Manhattan, whose mental health needs were being assessed. It was a hack with different fingers, infiltrating two servers operated by the State of New York and plucking out information of varying calibers. For about 9,000 people, it captured the kind of data that is sold to identity thieves, like names, addresses and so forth. But also stored in the servers was what people had to say about trauma, and how they were tossed about by the many storms of human existence or weathered them. This is useful and powerful information for researchers. Also, possibly, to criminals.