Marcia Savage reports:
Data security breaches involving third parties are on the rise, particularly in the health-care industry, a panel of security experts said Tuesday at the RSA Conference 2013.
“This is an upward trend,” the panel moderator, James Christiansen, CISO at the Sands Corp., told the audience of security professionals. “If it’s not on your radar, it should be.”
Read more on CRN. One of the panelists, Michael Breummer of Experian Data Breach Resolution provided a real example of how medical ID theft could have had fatal results:
A third party’s office cleaner stole medical records, the boy’s records among them. Someone then bought the records and used the boy’s information to get medical care. That person wasn’t allergic to penicillin, but the boy was. During a subsequent emergency, the boy was nearly treated with penicillin due to an update to his records based on the stolen medical information. Fortunately, the boy’s mother caught the error, he said. As it turns out, the cleaner’s background check was falsified.