Client Profile
- Industry: Healthcare
- Size: 70+ Providers
- Headquarters: United States
- Counsel: AM Law 200
Client Challenge
In early 2025, a regional healthcare network operating more than 70 facilities across four counties experienced a major disruption that disabled phone and network systems across multiple locations. Initially described as a technical outage, the incident escalated when a ransomware group claimed responsibility and alleged theft of sensitive patient, financial, and operational data.
The forensic handoff included 343GB of data spread across over 342,000 files, many of which were long-form, inconsistently structured, lacked reliable metadata, or were exported from legacy systems with little formatting standardization. Adding to the complexity, attribution proved particularly difficult, with most files missing system-level ownership information.
The client needed a partner that could navigate the ambiguity, cut through the noise, and surface actionable exposure across a fragmented data landscape, without slowing down under pressure.
Solution
ACTFORE structured the engagement in two distinct phases. The first phase focused on initial intake and triage: processing and culling data, assigning file attribution, and prioritizing likely responsive files. The team indexed and evaluated more than 342,000 documents, applying AI-driven logic to handle both structured exports and unstructured, inconsistently formatted files.
To overcome attribution gaps, ACTFORE partnered with the client to identify three primary data owners responsible for most of the content. Leveraging this, the team deployed a lightweight prefix-matching model using just the first two characters of file identifiers, a technique referred to as token-level pattern reduction. This eliminated the need for full-string parsing, reducing attribution effort by more than 95% and significantly accelerating file routing for downstream analysis.
The second phase centered on sensitive data extraction and final report generation. ACTFORE’s modular platform identified and extracted 40 key data elements from the responsive dataset, including Social Security numbers, patient IDs, dates of birth, and login credentials. Midway through the processing, the team identified a more efficient pattern for extracting complex data dependencies specific to this client's file structure. Rather than delaying delivery, ACTFORE immediately reran the updated extraction logic, demonstrating how its flexible architecture can improve accuracy without compromising speed.
Results
The project concluded in just nine days, exceeding expectations and producing a jurisdiction-ready output for breach notification. ACTFORE processed more than 342,000 files, identifying approximately 170,000 as responsive and extracting over 7.9 million rows of sensitive information. This included more than 20,000 Social Security numbers, over 280,000 dates of birth, 270,000 unique patient identifiers, and hundreds of login credentials.
This engagement illustrates how ACTFORE’s speed, adaptability, and AI-first architecture can solve complex data challenges in high-stakes healthcare environments. Through close collaboration and precision-driven workflows, the team maintained pace under pressure and delivered a fully defensible output within tight regulatory timelines.
About Us
Since 2022, ACTFORE has offered legal counsel, insurance carriers, and corporations advanced AI/ML-powered data mining technology solutions to swiftly detect and uncover sensitive information compromised in cyber breaches. ACTFORE’s on-premises, onshore, technology-first approach can process over 1 million files per hour, offering clients the fastest and most accurate assessment of compromised information. This enables swift identification of the extent of exfiltration to better assess risk.
Setting a new standard in data forensics and incident response, clients retain full control of their data with ACTFORE’s certified lab, or by requesting local deployment behind their own firewall. With over 1,000+ completed successful global engagements to date, ACTFORE consistently delivers accurate, comprehensive, results on time and on budget. For more information, please visit www.actfore.com.