Personal information of more than 5,000 people who have been patients at Valley View Hospital may have been compromised by a computer virus that infected the hospital's computer system, according to officials there. Hospital information technology (IT) officials discovered the virus in January, said Stacey Gavrell, Valley View Community Relations director, and steps were taken immediately to quarantine the virus and begin the process of determining what happened. A forensic IT team was brought in to conduct the investigation, she said, and the results so far indicate that: From Sept. 11, 2013, to Jan. 23 this year, the virus took screen shots of Internet web pages off selected hospital computers and stored the information in hidden, encrypted files within the hospital's system.
