Pam Dixon and John Emerson have authored a new report from the World Privacy Forum: The Geography of Medical Identity Theft. From the report: Summary of Findings and Recommendations This report finds that medical identity theft is growing overall in the United States, however, there’s a catch. The consumer complaint data suggests that the crime…
Category: Health Data
National Capital Poison Center discloses ransomware incident
One of the reasons DataBreaches.net has never confined its reporting and analyses to HIPAA-covered entities is that there are so many other types of entities that collect and store health or medical information. Today’s example comes from the National Capital Poison Center, who found themselves in the unenviable position of reporting a ransomware attack that…
What were the worst health data breaches in 2017?
I’ve been working on compiling some annual statistics for 2017 for Protenus. This will be their second year of publishing an annual report for U.S. breaches involving health data, and I think readers will find some surprises in the statistics. Sometimes numbers do not match our impressions. But as I was working on entering and…
Glens Falls Hospital workers’ Social Security numbers and flu shot status released in internal email
Michael Goot reports on a breach involving hospital employees’ health information. In this case, the health information relates to a work issue, and Social Security numbers are also involved, but it’s still their health information that caught my eye. The names and Social Security numbers of Glens Falls Hospital employees who had not received flu…
24,000 UNC Health Care patients affected by potential security breach
John Murawski reports: UNC Health Care is notifying 24,000 patients about a potential security breach at a UNC dermatology practice in Burlington. UNC said Friday that personal patient information was contained on a hard drive of a laptop computer that was stolen from UNC Dermatology & Skin Cancer Center in October. The absence of the…
Sinai Health System notifies 11,350 patients after phishing incident
Ally Marotti reports: At least two employees at Sinai Health System had their email accounts compromised in a phishing incident, potentially affecting the information of 11,350 people. The seven-member hospital system said in a statement Thursday that it cannot confirm whether any patient information in the email accounts was viewed. However, there is a low…