{"id":258588,"date":"2026-01-30T02:11:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T02:11:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/258588\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T02:11:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T02:11:10","slug":"cybersecurity-group-identifies-person-behind-manage-my-health-hack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/258588\/","title":{"rendered":"Cybersecurity group identifies person behind Manage My Health hack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/4JV8FCI_Media_2_jpg.jpeg\" width=\"1050\" height=\"787\" alt=\"ManageMyHealth, Manage My Health generic images\"\/><\/p>\n<p class=\"photo-captioned__information\">\nThe Manage My Health privacy breach is one of the biggest in New Zealand&#8217;s history.<br \/>\nPhoto: RNZ \/ Finn Blackwell\n<\/p>\n<p>A cybersecurity group says they&#8217;ve identified the person responsible for hacking into the Manage My Health portal, and now it wants justice served.<\/p>\n<p>The privacy breach is one of the biggest in New Zealand&#8217;s history, after hackers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\/national\/584053\/manage-my-health-data-breach-a-timeline-of-what-happened-and-everything-we-know-so-far\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">gained access to health data<\/a> being held by the privately owned patient records company, Manage My Health.<\/p>\n<p>Those responsible, a hacker who calls themselves Kazu, demanded US$60,000 for the stolen data.<\/p>\n<p>Manage My Health has been granted a High Court injunction preventing anyone from accessing or sharing the stolen data.<\/p>\n<p>Kazu had previously published samples of the leaked information online.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier this month, all posts referring to Manage My Health had been removed from the page.<\/p>\n<p>The International Online Crime Coordination Centre (IOC3) has been tracking Kazu, following the breach.<\/p>\n<p>It targets online harm, including child exploitation, grooming, extremism and fraud.<\/p>\n<p>The group has shared its investigation with RNZ. We have agreed not to name the person believed to be behind Kazu or details that could jeopardise a further investigation.<\/p>\n<p>They have also alerted the authorities.<\/p>\n<p>IOC3 executive director Caden Scott said they needed to be careful.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re just mindful that we&#8217;re still looking into this individual, and we don&#8217;t want to mistakenly drive this person underground by making them aware that there are these kinds of investigations ongoing into them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Scott said they wanted to see the person behind the attack arrested.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We definitely want justice,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We want this person to be looked into and this person to be arrested as a result of their actions. They&#8217;ve definitely committed a plethora of crimes there, and this isn&#8217;t the only attack that they&#8217;ve done. They&#8217;ve attacked numerous other institutions from across the entire globe.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He said health companies hold extremely sensitive data.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;When you look at healthcare institutions, or anything like that, especially ones that hold a lot of people&#8217;s very personal data, often times they don&#8217;t really have that choice in paying the ransom or not paying the ransom,&#8221; Scott said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;These are very sensitive topics and very sensitive information, so a lot of times it&#8217;s best to do whatever possible to stop that information getting out.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Scott encouraged victims of ransomware attacks not to pay the hackers.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Paying that ransom doesn&#8217;t guarantee that the data isn&#8217;t going to be leaked,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;They might ask you for half-a-million dollars, you pay that, and then they decide: &#8216;Well, can also sell this database to everyone as well and make even more money&#8217;.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It was better to go through law enforcement, Scott said.<\/p>\n<p>The National Cyber Security Centre&#8217;s chief operating officer Mike Jagusch said they were aware of information in the public domain identifying those who&#8217;ve claimed responsibility for the attack on Manage My Health.<\/p>\n<p>He said they were working with police, Health New Zealand, and other agencies to reduce the impact of the breach and prevent further exploitation of the leaked data.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;At the National Cyber Security Centre, we have a range of tools and information it uses to help establish the identity of malicious actors,&#8221; he said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This process is called attribution, and it can be very complex. It requires significant analysis to have the necessary level of confidence to attribute activity to an actor or group.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Jagusch said public attribution of cyber activity to a group or state is a whole-of-government process, and was undertaken when it was in the national interest to do so.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/radionz.us6.list-manage.com\/subscribe?u=211a938dcf3e634ba2427dde9&amp;id=b3d362e693\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Manage My Health privacy breach is one of the biggest in New Zealand&#8217;s history. Photo: RNZ \/&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-258588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-current-affairs","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-podcasts","15":"tag-public-radio","16":"tag-radio-new-zealand","17":"tag-rnz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}