UK Biobank back online soon, months after someone tried to sell 500k people's data on Alibaba
Charity confirms slew of security improvements as it waits for UK.gov's go-ahead
The UK Biobank (UKB) has announced that its platform, which safeguards the world's most comprehensive biomedical dataset, is once again secure and ready for academics to regain access. This comes months after a major data leak involving 500,000 volunteers' health information, where the private data was unlawfully listed for sale on the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba.
The UKB Research Analysis Platform (UKB-RAP) has been inaccessible to medical researchers since the April 2023 breach. The charity responsible for the UKB will proceed with a phased re-introduction of researchers to the platform once they have received the necessary approvals from health data controllers and central government. UKB-RAP currently houses 30 petabytes of data, used by approximately 20,000 researchers to study various diseases such as cancer, dementia, Parkinson's disease, and COVID-19 immunity.
Following the security overhaul, researchers will undergo a manual output checking system, where human reviewers will inspect data requests before allowing access. This system will eventually be replaced with an automated process expected to be implemented in the following year. To prevent the accidental inclusion of de-identified data in researchers' code, UKB is conducting daily automated scans of code repositories and providing training to researchers to prevent such occurrences.
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