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Crooks demand $10m after stealing patient data

Some eight million US consumers are at risk of falling victim to ID theft following the stealing of their details from a Virginia state website used for tracking prescription drug abuse.

The website's online security was compromised and details of the patients deleted by cyber crooks, who are now demanding $10 million (6.6 million) before a copy of the data is handed back to the organisation.

Details of the development have been published on leaked documents site Wikileaks.org, which says the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program (PMP) was compromised on April 30th.

The ransom demand left on the PMP website, which appears to have been entirely hampered and unavailable, according to Wikileaks, says: "For $10 million, I will gladly send along the password".

"I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their backups seem to have gone missing, too."

According to the Washington Post, Sandra Whitley Ryals, the director of Virginia's department of health professions, confirmed the incident, saying a criminal investigation by federal authorities is already under way.

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