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,…
Category: Health Data
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,…
Jamestown Pharmacist Arrested and Charged with Health Care Fraud and Aggravated Identity Theft in a Multi-Million Dollar Health Care Fraud Scheme
December 23, Nashville – A federal indictment returned last week and unsealed on Friday charges Jamestown pharmacist Philip Hall, 48, with 9 counts of Health Care Fraud and 6 counts of Aggravated Identity Theft, announced Acting United States Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Thomas J. Jaworski. According to the indictment, Hall was a licensed…
CA: Electronic data security breach at Milton long-term care home revealed
Marney Carmichael reports on an incident in Ontario, Canada: Halton region says a privacy breach at Allendale Long-Term Care Home in Milton exposed personal electronic health records from 2005 to this summer. A cybersecurity incident in June of this year involving third-party software led to unauthorized access of residents’ personal data, including names, health details…