The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights, the government entity that manages the privacy of health care information that you share with doctors and others, has issued new guidance on ransomware. While technically, it only applies to organizations that they regulate, in reality, almost everything they said applies equally to […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]I have written several times about the fight between Cottage Health System and Columbia Casualty, a division of CNA Insurance. In 2013 Cottage’s systems were breached and the private information of thousands of patients was publicly disclosed. Their insurance company paid $4.125 million for costs related to the breach, including a class action lawsuit. That […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]Databreaches is reporting that someone discovered a large amount of data on a public segment of Amazon Web Services. This person, described as a technology enthusiast (i.e. a geek) downloaded some of this data and discovered it contained medical claims data. The repository, which supposedly contained gigabytes of data was later identified to belong to […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]The Office Of Civil Rights (OCR) has been pretty quiet these last couple of years regarding HIPAA audits, but that may be about to change. OCR’s staff is small, so they have hired a contractor, FCI, according to the Federal Register. In an interview, deputy director Deven McGraw says that they will be starting up […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield revealed that it has been hacked. Excellus did not detect it had been hacked at all. In fact, it was not until they hired Mandiant to do an audit in the wake of the other Blue Cross hacks that they found out that they had been hacked. The data of […]
Continue reading → [DISPLAY_ACURAX_ICONS]Cancer Care Group, an Indianapolis based Oncology practice learned a lesson the hard way. They allowed an employee to have an unencrypted laptop and a server in his car, from which both computers were stolen. They discovered that the computers contained protected health information – social security numbers and insurance data for 55,000 patients. The […]
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