Iroquois Memorial Hospital 2026 Data Breach
Healthcare provider · Hospital and medical services · Community healthcare provider · USA
Iroquois Memorial Hospital (IL) Breach (2025): ~600 Patient Records Including Medical Diagnoses & SSN Exposed via PEAR Ransomware
Community hospital providing acute care and related medical services.
Confirmed · ObscureIQ Intelligence
Breach Risk Index i
94/100
Lower riskHigher risk
High and current: recent, valuable data circulating on the dark web now.
Data Sensitivity i
ElevatedExposed data raises the risk of fraud, targeting, and impersonation. Proactive steps are warranted.
621Records
2026Year
The Breach Risk Index (BRI) is a proprietary 0–100 score rating how dangerous a breach is right now, based on how recently the data has been circulating on the dark web and how valuable it is to attackers.
Crucial data exposed
SSNSocial Security Number
PHI / MedicalMedical Diagnosis
Breach Summary
Iroquois Memorial Hospital, a small community hospital in Watseka, Illinois, was attacked by the PEAR ransomware group on about November 25, 2025; the hospital discovered the intrusion on December 11, 2025 when PEAR posted its claim, asserting exfiltration of roughly 3.5 TB of data. The incident was disclosed to HHS on January 9, 2026, which lists 621 individuals affected. Exposed data reportedly included personal identifiers (including Social Security numbers) and protected health information such as diagnoses. (NOTE: the prior record listed ~1,367,755 affected, which is implausible for a small rural hospital and is contradicted by the HHS figure of 621; corrected.)
Full threat analysis, exploitation vectors, and principal guidance below.
11 additional sections · verified field analysis · defensive doctrine
Querying breach corpus…
Cross-referencing exposed field types…
Resolving threat-actor attribution…
Compiling principal risk advisory…
621 records analyzed
About Iroquois Memorial Hospital
Iroquois Memorial Hospital is a small community acute-care hospital and health system based in Watseka, Illinois, serving the rural Iroquois County area. It provides inpatient, outpatient, emergency, and related medical services, maintaining patient identity, insurance, billing, and clinical records.
Why They Hold Your Data
Community hospitals collect patient identity, insurance, billing, and medical records tied to inpatient, outpatient, and administrative workflows.
Recent Developments
The PEAR ransomware group attacked Iroquois Memorial Hospital on about November 25, 2025 and posted its claim on December 11, 2025 (when the hospital discovered the intrusion), asserting exfiltration of roughly 3.5 terabytes of data. The hospital disclosed the incident to HHS on January 9, 2026, reporting 621 individuals affected. Class-action investigations followed.
Data Points Exposed
5 verified field types
Email Address
Full Name
Medical Diagnosis Critical
Phone Number
Social Security Number Critical
Breach Impact
Although the volume of exfiltrated data was large (~3.5 TB, much of it likely operational), the confirmed patient impact is small, 621 individuals per the HHS breach portal. For those individuals, the combination of Social Security numbers and medical/diagnosis information still creates serious identity-theft and medical-fraud risk, and a rural community hospital may be the only local provider, heightening the personal impact.
Exploitation & Downstream Threats
• Identity theft and synthetic identity construction using SSN | • Medical identity fraud and insurance abuse using diagnosis/health data | • Targeted phishing and vishing referencing hospital care or billing | • SIM swap attacks where phone numbers are present
Principal Risk Advisory
What this means for a principal
A healthcare-linked breach: exposure ties a named individual to a provider relationship and, where clinical or insurance data is present, to conditions and treatment. For a high-profile principal this is targeting-grade, not merely identity-theft-grade: the combination lets an adversary locate, impersonate, or pressure the principal with little additional work.
What You Should Do
- Freeze credit at all three bureaus and monitor for new-account and tax-refund fraud.
- Watch for medical-benefit fraud and health-themed phishing that references real provider relationships.
- Guard against SIM-swap and vishing: add a carrier port-out PIN and verify any 'support' calls independently.
- Do not use unofficial 'am I affected' lookups; several are themselves harvesting operations.
How ObscureIQ Can Help
- Corpus confirmation: determine whether and where the principal (plus household and staff) appear in this dataset and which specific fields are exposed for them.
- Exposure mapping and footprint neutralization: cross-reference against broker-available data and suppress still-removable elements, prioritizing address and phone, since this record re-seeds broker networks.
- ThreatWatch tuned to this incident's identifiers and misuse pattern (impersonation and targeting patterns, not generic credential monitoring).
P
Threat Actor: PEARConfidence: Low
Motivation: Unknown
An ambiguous label without enough reliable public sourcing for a stable threat actor profile. It may refer to a short-lived group, handle, acronym, or non-actor entity.
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