Almost 500K VA employees’ COVID-19 vaccination data exposed

Nearly 500,000 Department of Veterans Affairs employees had their COVID-19 vaccination status data breached last year due to inadequate data protection measures at the VA, FedScoop reports. The American Federation of Government Employee's union noted that the VA had improperly shared a spreadsheet containing the data with various Veterans Health Administration senior leaders. VA has since removed the spreadsheet, which was inappropriately disclosed in a breach last October, following an investigation by the agency's Data Breach Response Service. "Upon internal review, the VA agrees that the information contained in these documents should not have been placed on SharePoint without appropriate access permissions and this incident resulted in the inadvertent or unauthorized transmissions or disclosure of sensitive personal information," said VA Chief of Human Capital Management Jessica Bonjorni in a notice sent to AFGE bargaining unit members. The VA will be completing any other investigations on the incident, according to the notice.