Be forewarned: the news story misspells”breach” as “breech.” I couldn’t bring myself to use their headline so fixed that, but am leaving this: Contra Costa County officials have begun sending out letters this week to potential victims of the “unauthorized access to certain county employee email accounts” in a computer breech between July to August…
Category: Health Data
Newman Regional Health notifies 52,224 patients after long-running breach of employee email accounts
Newman Regional Health (NRH) is notifying more than 52,000 patients after an investigation revealed unauthorized access to a limited number of their employee e-mail accounts between January 26, 2021 and November 23, 2021. NRH is not a large hospital. According to their site, the Kansas hospital is a not-for-profit 25-bed critical access hospital, owned by…
SuperCare Health Sued After Data Breach
The gap from the disclosure of a data breach to the filing of a potential class-action lawsuit is often a matter of weeks (or less), although a lot of lawsuits are dismissed for lack of Article III standing (see a 2021 review of data breach litigation here). In March, in-home respiratory care provider SuperCare…
Patients increasingly suing hospitals over data breaches
Jeff Lagasse reports: Industries are increasingly being sued by consumers for data breaches, but the sector with the biggest litigation increase is healthcare, according to new findings from the law firm BakerHostetler. In fact, healthcare comprises 23% of lawsuits due to data breaches. The next highest after that is business and professional services at 17%,…
‘JekyllBot:5’ Vulnerabilities Allow Remote Hacking of Hospital Robots
Eduard Kovacs reports: Cybersecurity researchers specializing in healthcare IoT systems have discovered five serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited to remotely hack Aethon’s TUG autonomous mobile robots. The TUG robots are used by hundreds of hospitals in North America, Europe and Asia to transport goods, materials and clinical supplies. Their role is to give staff…
At small and rural hospitals, ransomware attacks are causing unprecedented crises
Marion Renault reports: At 12:08 p.m. on a Monday, a Sky Lakes Medical Center employee tapped an email link. Within minutes, that click cracked open the Oregon hospital’s digital infrastructure for cybercriminals to infiltrate. By the time IT staff started looking into it, “everything was being encrypted,” said John Gaede, director of information services. On…