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Security1 publisher2 min readPublished

Stolen vendor credentials pulled patient SSNs out of Veradigm's API

Veradigm told the SEC that an attacker took credentials from a vendor's environment and used them against a Veradigm API to download patient data including Social Security numbers, while The Gentlemen gang claims 3.5 million records.

The Watch · Security desk

Illustration accompanying Stolen vendor credentials pulled patient SSNs out of Veradigm's API

What happened

  • Those credentials were used to download copies of patient personal data including, in some instances, Social Security numbers, and Veradigm says no clinical or medical data was involved.
  • Veradigm says access was confined to that one interface and did not reach its networks, servers or databases, caused no operational disruption, and is now with law enforcement.
  • The Gentlemen ransomware gang added Veradigm to its leak site on Friday, claiming to hold the health records of 3.5 million patients.
  • Veradigm separately told the Department of Health and Human Services in December 2025 that 2,672,036 people had health data exposed in a December 2024 breach.

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Why it matters

  • contradiction One account has Social Security numbers and no clinical data; the other has 3.5 million patients' health records. Hospitals sizing their notification duties are currently choosing between a vendor's scope statement and a criminal's sales pitch.
  • exposure For a Veradigm customer, the reachable surface now includes any third party holding a live API credential issued on that customer's behalf, and the customer's own access controls were nowhere in the attack path.
  • decision Regulated data holders have to decide whether they can produce, on request, an inventory of vendor-held API credentials with expiry dates and per-credential volume limits, because containment claims about networks and servers say nothing about that layer.

The initial access was the vendor's. A credential issued to that third party for a Veradigm API, one the vendor used to provide services on behalf of Veradigm customers, sat in the vendor's environment, and once the attacker held it the interface did what it was built to do for anyone presenting a valid token [3]. What came back was patient personal data [4].

The filing does not say how long that credential had been valid, whether the interface capped bulk reads, or when the downloads happened [5]. Veradigm did not respond to requests for comment [9]. Those gaps are the difference between an incident with a fixed record count and one whose count was set by how long the attacker chose to keep paging through results.

Infrastructure scope and record scope are two different measures of blast radius, and they don't move together here. An API that returns patient data on behalf of thousands of hospitals and doctors worldwide, at a company reporting $594 million in 2024 revenue [2], is a sufficient vantage point if patient data is the objective.

The 3.5 million figure is the gang's own inventory description of goods it wants paid for. The gang is prolific enough that the listing is worth logging: hundreds of attacks since it emerged last fall, with Nutex and AnMed among recent healthcare victims [10].

Whatever this count turns out to be, the volume sits in the aggregation layer rather than in any one hospital. Aesto reported 9 million people last week [13], Baylor Genetics more than 2.8 million from a June incident [14], and CareCloud with several other firms 3.7 million from March [15]. That is at least 15.5 million people across three disclosures [16].

This week's SEC filings show two different failure modes side by side. Boston Scientific is still carrying out substantial restoration of its distribution network, only recently brought back a system managing remote monitoring for cardiac implants, and has said the attack will keep it from its quarterly net sales target [17][18]. Veradigm's 2019 SamSam incident was that kind of event too: outages across thousands of hospitals, followed by class action lawsuits [11]. A stolen API token causes no outage and no missed guidance; the damage lands entirely on the people whose identifiers moved.

The board-level version of this incident is a list: every vendor holding a live credential to an API that returns your customers' data, and the volume each of those credentials can pull before something trips. Veradigm's disclosure shows what one compromised line on that list is worth to an attacker who never touches the data holder's network [7].

What to watch

  • An HHS breach-portal entry with a person count for this incident, the first independent test of the 3.5 million figure.
  • Whether Veradigm names the vendor, which would show how many other data holders issued API credentials into the same environment.
  • Whether The Gentlemen publishes samples, since files containing clinical data would contradict Veradigm's account of what was taken.
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