The CBC is reporting that thousands of personal health records in Alberta, Canada might have been copied to a unknown location due to a Trojan virus hitting their systems between May 14th and May 29th.

Bill Trasford, who’s the senior vice-president for Alberta Health services also suggested that they had to wait before they were able to clean their systems out using their various anti-virus programs, potentially leaving many more Albertans venerable. Alberta Health Services have sent letters to over 11,000 health care patients with a majority of those people in the Edmonton area.

Earlier I wrote an article that stated the Internet isn’t as powerful as we think. Alberta is the first province in Canada to have moved all personal health records to the Internet for easy access, however, I really don’t think it’s worth risking the people’s privacy for simplicity. This is a prime example of why governments aren’t yet able to use the Internet without having the potential of being attacked. I personally believe we should slow down our advancements towards an “online society” and wait till we know for sure that these types of things won’t happen again.

It’s also important to state that according to the CBC the virus which hit the computers holding the health records was over four years old. This leaves the question of just how much effort our governments are putting into making sure our personal information is secure.