Nicole Lewis reports: Acceleration in the use of electronic medical records may lead to an increase in personal health information theft, according to a new study that shows there were more than 275,000 cases of medical information theft in the U.S. last year.Unlike stealing a driver’s license or a credit card, data gleaned from personal…
Category: Health Data
ID Theft Ring Stole Patient Info From Northwestern
Seven young women from Chicago, the south suburbs and downstate have been arrested for their alleged roles in a massive identity theft ring that claimed hundreds of victims from across the country. […] The year-long identity theft scam saw the those involved charging more than $300,000 in more than 500 transactions involving jewelry, furniture, household…
ID theft ring exploited medical records to get credit cards
The Associated Press reports on an ID theft ring in Chicago that targeted medical records to obtain information with which they could get credit cards: Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart says the ring charged more than $300,000 to the credit accounts of 245 victims. Dart says one suspect worked for a janitorial service that cleaned…
DHEC employee fired after SLED inquiry
Earlier in March, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control reported a breach involving the exposure of unshredded documents. At the time, it was not clear that any medical records were involved and so the incident was not reported here. But a follow-up investigation reveals that medical records were, indeed, involved. WIS10 reports:…
Your health, tax, and search data siphoned
Dan Goodin reports: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s Bing, and other leading websites are leaking medical histories, family income, search queries, and massive amounts of other sensitive data that can be intercepted even when encrypted, computer scientists revealed in a new research paper. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft itself were able to infer the sensitive data…
Three newly revealed breaches affect over 20,000 (updated)
The new HHS/OCR web site has added two three more breach reports: Montefiore Medical Center State: New York Approx. # of Individuals Affected: 625 Date of Breach: 2/20/10 Type of Breach: Theft Location of Breached Information: Laptop Private Practice City and State: San Antonio, Texas Approx. # of Individuals Affected: 21,000 Date of Breach: 2/20/10…