Eduard Kovacs reports: Cybersecurity researchers specializing in healthcare IoT systems have discovered five serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited to remotely hack Aethon’s TUG autonomous mobile robots. The TUG robots are used by hundreds of hospitals in North America, Europe and Asia to transport goods, materials and clinical supplies. Their role is to give staff…
Category: Health Data
At small and rural hospitals, ransomware attacks are causing unprecedented crises
Marion Renault reports: At 12:08 p.m. on a Monday, a Sky Lakes Medical Center employee tapped an email link. Within minutes, that click cracked open the Oregon hospital’s digital infrastructure for cybercriminals to infiltrate. By the time IT staff started looking into it, “everything was being encrypted,” said John Gaede, director of information services. On…
Update to Christie Clinics breach disclosure
On March 25, Christie Business Holdings Company, P.C. (“Christie Clinic”) disclosed a breach. As DataBreaches.net reported the next day, the clinic reported that an unauthorized actor had gained access to one business email account between July 14, 2021 and August 19, 2021. Christie’s investigation indicated that the intent of the attacker may have been to…
Federal Court Dismisses Data Breach Litigation
The following news item refers to litigation related to a data leak discovered by Dutch researcher Jelle Ursem that was reported in collaboration with DataBreaches.net. Shing Tse and Kristin L. Bryan of Squire Patton Boggs write: Recently, a federal court in Kansas joined a number of other courts in finding that allegations of future, speculative harm unadorned…
Weekend potpourri of breaches and leaks
It’s the weekend, but breaches don’t take a break. Some breach or leak disclosures that I spotted in reading the news today: Ballad Health in Tennessee has disclosed a breach. As reported by WCYB, who also includes the full notice from Ballad, on or about January 13, Ballad detected unusual activity in an employee’s email…
HHS OCR Issues Annual HIPAA Reports to Congress
Chris Bennington of Epstein Becker Green writes, in part: The HITECH Act requires OCR to issue annual reports to Congress of HIPAA breaches and complaints received by OCR during the calendar year. For 2020, OCR reported that it received 656 notifications of breaches affecting 500 or more individuals, 66,509 notifications of breaches affecting fewer than…