A proposed settlement has been reached in a class action lawsuit over the 2015 cyberattack of health insurer Anthem, Inc., involving the theft of the personal information of 78.8 million people. The $115 million settlement, if approved by the Court, will be the largest data breach settlement in history. Attorneys from Altshuler Berzon, Cohen Milstein,…
Category: Health Data
Judges Question FTC Data Security Standard at LabMD Argument
Jimmy Koo reports: The Federal Trade Commission’s data security enforcement standard came under fire June 22 from a panel of federal appeals court judges ( LabMD, Inc. v. FTC , 11th Cir., No. 16-16270, oral argument 6/21/17 ). As predicted, the level of harm required for the FTC to act was “front and center” during…
Google Will Now Remove Private Medical Records From Search Results
Mark Bergen reports: Alphabet Inc.’s Google has quietly decided to scrub an entire category of online content — personal medical records — from its search results, a departure from its typically hands-off approach to policing the web. Google lists the information it removes from its search results on its policy page. On Thursday, the website…
$1 million payout for Shelburne hospital privacy breach
Amy Woolvett reports: A class action lawsuit has just set a precedent in Canada against snooping into medical files. “If you a breach (a person’s privacy) you are going to pay for it,” said Raymond Wagner, a lawyer who represented the 681 eligible class members involved in the biggest privacy breach in Canada. Halifax Supreme…
Airway Oxygen notifies 500,000 patients after ransomware attack
Earlier this month, Purity Cylinder/Airway Oxygen in Michigan reported a breach to the Vermont Attorney General’s Office. According to their notification, on April 18, they discovered that ransomware had been installed on their network. There was no evidence, they say, that any protected health information was actually accessed or acquired, but they notified those who…
Cleveland Medical Associates tells patients of ransomware incident
Cleveland Medical Associates, PLLC, a four-physician primary care clinic in Cleveland, Tennessee, is providing notice to its patients that on April 21, 2017, it discovered that, the evening before, its computer network had been impacted by ransomware, a type of computer virus that locks up, or encrypts, information and demands that a payment be made…