A call seeking comment on the incident from the Virginia PMP program office was not immediately returned. A call to the Virginia State Police seeking confirmation on whether it is investigating the reported incident also was not immediately returned.

As of Wednesday, the main PMP Web site and all links on the site were unavailable.

The in the wake of a spate of drug abuse-related crimes and some deaths in the commonwealth involving the painkiller Oxycontin. It allows pharmacists and health care professionals to track prescription drug abuse, such as patients who go "doctor shopping" to find more than one doctor to prescribe narcotics. According to a description of the program from a cached version of the site, as of Jan. 1, there were more than 31.6 million records in the PMP database. Doctors, pharmacists and other authorized users make requests for data from the PMP database via a secure Web page, the description said.

The reported Tuesday that the FBI and State Police had confirmed investigations of a hacking incident at the PMP. The story also quoted Virginia Gov. Timothy Kaine as saying the compromised data was not the same as patient files from doctors' offices. "These were not patient records, so it's not compromise of health-care information about particular individuals," the governor is quoted as saying in the Times-Dispatch.

The compromise comes at a time of heightened . President Obama's recently passed economic stimulus package includes a health care component, which initially provides $20 billion for the creation of a The bill mandates new privacy and security controls for health care data that are seen as being long overdue.