2026 Seoul National University Hospital — internal email mis-send; ~16,000 obstetric patient records
Data compromised
Hospital notice: mothers’ names, mother/newborn patient IDs, mothers’ DOB, height/weight, obstetric history; fetus/newborn sex and medical test results. Hospital said RRNs and phones were not included.
Technical writeup
Verified hospital disclosure — Korea JoongAng Daily March 19, 2026 (incident ~March 14 weekend). Seoul National University Hospital said a staff member mistyped an email address while sending an internal message at 2:07 p.m. Saturday, sending obstetric patient records to an unintended recipient. About 16,000 individuals’ records were partially exposed, including mothers’ names, mother and newborn patient IDs, mothers’ dates of birth, height and weight, obstetric history, and fetus/newborn sex and medical test results. The hospital said resident registration numbers and phone numbers were not included, claimed the email remained unopened, requested deletion, contacted the email operator, notified affected people, and reported to the Personal Information Protection Commission and Ministry of Education. August 2025–26 Herald coverage revisited SNUH’s disclosure practices and prior incidents; this row indexes the March 2026 mis-send census. recordsAffected 16000; companyConfirmed true.
Root cause
Staff entered wrong email address on internal message (~2:07 p.m. Saturday); unintended recipient received obstetric patient file attachment