News6 in Texas reports that United Regional Health Care System has disclosed an incident that occurred last July when someone accessed an employee email account. It was only in December that they first confirmed that patient information could have been accessed in the email account, even though there was no direct evidence that it had…
Category: Health Data
University of Washington Medicine patients file class action lawsuit over December 2018 leak
Amy Clancy has an update on a University of Washington Medicine breach that was disclosed in February 2019. The breach was a human error incident that resulted in more than 970,000 patients having their information exposed online for several weeks. Clancy reports that the breach has now led to a class-action lawsuit that could eventually…
Maroof International Hospital Hit with Severe Ransomware Attack
Raza Rizvi reports: Maroof International Hospital Islamabad’s entire computer network has been compromised in the wake of a massive ransomware attack. Maroof is one of the most expensive private hospitals in Islamabad According to Maroof officials, the ransomware attack targeted the hospital’s servers on February 13. Read more on ProPakistani.
NY: Computer breach exposes Community Care Physicians patients’ info
Eric Anderson reports: A number of Community Care Physicians patients may have had their protected health information, date of birth, and insurance coverage exposed during a hack of computers at Albany-based accounting firm BST & Co. CPAs. Those affected were first notified by letter from BST on Tuesday. BST said the computer virus was active…
Thinking about cybersecurity is great, but are you prepared for your building burning down?
Let’s not forget the physical threats to protected health information. This news report about a fire in Hillsdale, New York destroying the Hillsdale Healthcare medical practice should give you pause. Is this scenario anywhere in your risk assessment? Heather Bellow reports on the damage to a strip mall from the fire, but I’m going to…
Protenus releases its analysis of 2019 health data breaches
Protenus’s 2020 BreachBarometer is now available for free downloading. From their highlights: Our analysis is based on 572 health data breaches reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the media, or some other source during 2019 (Figure 1). As in years past, we do not have numbers for every incident in…