AAP reports: The federal health department breached the Privacy Act when it released data about one in 10 Australians and didn’t adequately protect their identities. In August 2016 the department published data on a government website regarding a 10 per cent sample of people who had made a claim for payment of Medicare benefits since…
Category: Health Data
Oklahoma man pleads guilty to using stolen medical records for identity theft
KXII reports: One of two men suspected of of using stolen medical records to commit identity theft has pleaded guilty in federal court. 34-year-old Robert Bond of Thackerville pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft. Read more on KXII. The report doesn’t indicate from where the medical records were stolen,…
Saskatchewan Health Authority: employee snooped in home care records for 7 years
A long-running insider snooping breach was first detected by the health authority last year. When the agency investigated, they found an employee had snooped in the records of 880 clients over a period of seven years. The Estevan Mercury reports that as a result of the incident and their findings, the authority has implemented a…
More details emerge on The MENTOR Network breach
On March 21, National Mentor Healthcare, doing business as Georgia MENTOR, announced that they were notifying patients of a data breach. A disk with protected health information mailed to them by a software provider was lost in the mail, they explained. They had reportedly discovered the loss on December 21. They did not disclose when…
Il: Group charged with dissemination of privileged information of women they sought to prevent from getting abortions
Insider breaches are global, and attempts to stop women from controlling their own bodies are also, sadly, global. Gilad Morag reports from Israel: The cyber division of State Attorney’s Office charged at the Tel Aviv District Court a medical secretary at a private Be’er Sheva clinic as well as two employees of the Hidabroot for…
“First do no harm” should be “First, secure your patient data, Doctor!”
When they discovered more than 42,000 patient records and millions of patient clinical notes exposed on a misconfigured rsync backup, researchers at UpGuard responsibly set out to notify the entity to secure their data. It turned out to be a Herculean task that would take almost two months and multiple entities to get the job…