{"id":258931,"date":"2026-01-30T07:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-30T07:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/258931\/"},"modified":"2026-01-30T07:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-30T07:02:10","slug":"manage-my-health-hacker-identified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/258931\/","title":{"rendered":"Manage My Health hacker identified"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnz.co.nz\/news\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">By Finn Blackwell of RNZ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>A cybersecurity group says it&#8217;s 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\u00a0gained access to health data\u00a0being held by the privately owned patient records company, Manage My Health.<\/p>\n<p>Those responsible, a hacker who calls themselves Kazu, demanded $US60,000 ($NZ100,000) 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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Finn Blackwell of RNZ A cybersecurity group says it&#8217;s identified the person responsible for hacking into the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":258932,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-258931","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258931","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=258931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258931\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/258932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}