Today’s example of “no need to hack if it’s leaking,” Catalin Cimpanu reports: The personal and health information of more than 16 million Brazilian COVID-19 patients has been leaked online after a hospital employee uploaded a spreadsheet with usernames, passwords, and access keys to sensitive government systems on GitHub this month. Among the systems that had credentials…
Category: Health Data
Service provider to fertility clinics discloses malware attack
A press release from US Fertility (“USF”) follows. The Center for Fertility and Gynecology in California is not listed among USF entities in the press release. I mention that because the Center for Fertility and Gynecology still has not posted anything on their site or issued any press release about a ransomware attack that NetWalker…
Fairchild Medical Center server was exposing patient information for 4.5 years until a security firm alerted them
Ugh. Fairchild Medical Center had a misconfigured server exposing PHI from December 16, 2015 until they were alerted to the problem in late July by an unnamed security company who discovered the exposure. Here’s their press release, below. Note that this does not (yet) appear on HHS’s breach tool. YREKA, Calif., Nov. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — In…
UK: Concern as personal data of 284 diabetic patients breached at NHS Highland
Chris MacLennan reports: A data breach at NHS Highland has led to the personal information of 284 patients with diabetes being shared with more than 30 people. The error, which occurred on Tuesday November 17, led to the names, dates of births, contact information and hospital identification numbers of the patients being revealed. Read more…
Indiana justices agree to hear hospital records suit stemming from insider snooping case
Attempts to hold an entity liable for the wrongdoing of an employee has produced mixed results in the courts. Here’s a case in Indiana like that, below. As seen on The Indiana Lawyer: Justices last week granted transfer in the case of Community Health Network, Inc. v. Heather McKenzie, et al., 20S-CT-648. Heather McKenzie’s medical records…
Bad Medicine: Hospital Hit With Multiple Data Breach Class Actions for Unauthorized Access of Patient Records
Kristin L. Bryan of Squire Patton Boggs writes: Healthcare data breaches are on the rise-recent estimates peg the number of patient records breached in 2019 as exceeding 41 million individuals. Additionally, approximately 60% of all healthcare data breaches are caused by internal actors—a statistic underscored by consecutive data breach class actions filed against the Mayo…