Hamilton County Mayor Weston Wamp acknowledged Tuesday that a data breach of a county contractor’s system may have exposed the private information of as many as 14,000 ambulance customers.
The county is now preparing to notify those affected by the breach.
The incident became public last week, when the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported on a confidential March 11 memo from the county attorney’s office suggesting the county was alerted to the issue in July and had failed to notify affected people within 60 days as required by law.
The mayor said Tuesday that the July email from National Recovery Service — a debt collection agency in Cleveland, Tennessee — did not meet the requirements for an official notice of a data breach and such notice did not arrive until February.
“The notification window is still active,” Wamp said in a meeting with the Times Free Press on Tuesday. “We’re within the 60-day window.”