The Community Memorial Health System in Ventura has sent out a notice regarding a data security breach involving patient information.

A CMHS employee’s email account was compromised by a phishing email and on June 23 the employee saw irregularities in their account and notified the CMHA administration.

This prompted an investigation into whether or not any personal information had been accessed and to determine the breadth of the incident. CMHS also called upon a forensic consultant to find out if there had been a data breach, according to the notice.

The consultant said there was no indication that personal information had been leaked but that he could not be totally certain.

The compromised email account contained the personal information of about 959 individuals, the report said. It included patient names, CMHS medical record numbers and certain health information. The account also contained several Social Security numbers but no bank account information or debit and credit card information.

As an extra precaution, the CMHS administration said that they will be notifying all affected individuals of the attack, temporarily disabling all external access to the CMHS email system and deploying additional alerts and monitoring tools.

• Contact Robert Shutt at rshutt@pacbiztimes.com.