HHS OCR has announced another settlement of a HIPAA complaint: Elite Dental Associates, Dallas (“Elite”) has agreed to pay $10,000 to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and to adopt a corrective action plan to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act…
Category: Exposure
Ca: Pharmacy patient health files discovered at Rankin landfill
Darrell Greer reports: The North West Company has recently issued a public information release notifying Kivalliq residents that materials containing health information were recovered from the Rankin Inlet landfill site this past Feb. 28. The release went on to state that the information belonged to patients of the previously operating Sakku Drugs in Rankin (since…
Sioux Falls VA notifies patients after HIPAA breach
KSFY reports: Officials with the Sioux Falls Veteran Affairs Health Care System are warning patients about a potential breach of privacy. The incident stems from letters sent to a Sioux Falls VA mail room printer on August 21, according to Public Affairs Officer Erin Bultje. VA staff were not aware the mail room printer was…
Vodafone customer account details ‘briefly exposed’ after software update
Tom Pullar-Strecker reports: Vodafone says customers were able to access other people’s account information through its MyVodafone app on Wednesday morning. Spokeswoman Meera Kaushik said the privacy breach followed a planned upgrade to the app at 7am, which resulted in an “unexpected caching issue”. Read more on Stuff.
Heyyo dating app leaked users’ personal data, photos, location, more
Catalin Cimpanu reports: Online dating app Heyyo has made the same mistake that thousands of companies have made before it — namely, it left a server exposed on the internet without a password. This leaky server, an Elasticsearch instance, exposed the personal details, images, location data, phone numbers, and dating preferences for nearly 72,000 users,…
UK: Unshredded NHS records were dumped in a town centre to weigh down scaffolding at art festival
We really need to have an “Oh, FFS!” category for breaches. Rob Pattinson reports: Medical records of hundreds of thousands of NHS patients were dumped in a town centre to weigh down scaffolding. They were meant to be shredded but instead used as ballast for an art festival structure. Read more on The Sun.