HHS OCR announced another settlement that is their ninth ransomware investigation and their third settlement as part of their Risk Analysis Initiative. This one stems from a breach by VPN Solutions that was previously reported on this site: Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced a…
Category: Health Data
HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles HIPAA Security Rule Investigation with USR Holdings, LLC Concerning the Deletion of Electronic Protected Health Information
Note: In 2019, when USR Holdings disclosed this breach to affected patients, they did not mention that ePHI had been deleted. So in 2025, we are first learning of this part of the breach? The following is HHS OCR’s press release today. Settlement resolves multiple Security Rule failures Today, the U.S. Department of Health and…
HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles 8th Ransomware Investigation with Elgon Information Systems
Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced an $80,000 settlement with Elgon Information Systems (Elgon), a Massachusetts company that provides electronic medical record and billing support services to covered entities, under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) Security Rule. OCR enforces the HIPAA Privacy,…
Khalil Center’s impressively rapid incident response
HHS’s public breach tool added a listing today that was submitted by the Khalil Foundation (DBA Khalil Center). The center describes itself as a psychological and spiritual community wellness center advancing the professional practice of psychology rooted in Islamic principles. They are covered by HIPAA. On December 22, they notified HHS that 1153 individuals had…
Westend Dental agrees to pay Indiana $350K and to implement corrective action plan to settle charges of multiple HIPAA violations
TechCrunch recently did its annual write-up of badly handled data security incidents. The following wasn’t in it but is one of the worst security and privacy failures that I’ve ever read, and that’s saying a lot. This case stems from a ransomware attack by Medusa Locker in October 2020 that is first being seriously addressed…
More details emerge about RIBridges data breach; Deloitte tells state threat actors have leaked data
Threat actors’ leak site unreachable due to DoS attack; DataBreaches given exclusive preview of leak Marc Fortier reports: The hackers behind a major cyberattack that hit the State of Rhode Island’s online system for delivering health and human service benefits have released some residents’ files to a site on the dark web, state officials announced Monday. “Unfortunately,…