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UK Biobank back online soon, months after someone tried to sell 500k people's data on Alibaba
UK Biobank's Research Analysis Platform is being brought back online after a six-month shutdown following an April attack that exposed 500,000 volunteers' health records listed for sale on Alibaba. The platform will reopen in phases with enhanced security measures, including manual review of downloadable files, mandatory multifactor authentication (MFA), and automatic logouts after 15 minutes of inactivity. Researchers will face restrictions on data downloads and sharing until a fully automated output checking system launches next year, and those with de-identified data in their code repositories face sanctions.
Why it matters: Medical researchers using UK Biobank rely on access to 30 petabytes of genomic data for cancer, dementia, and other disease research; the extended outage has delayed critical studies while the phased reopening with output restrictions will slow their workflows. Organizations managing research datasets should review their own access controls, researcher training, and automated monitoring for accidental data exposure in code repositories.
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- First seen by Cybersecurity Tracker