A study commissioned in Australia by the National Association for Information Destruction (NAID), a non-profit, data protection watchdog agency, has found significant amounts of personal information left on recycled computers. For the organisations recycling their drives, this is a data breach problem. For individuals, their most private information is at risk. The NAID-ANZ Secondhand Hard…
Category: Health Data
SANS "Health Care Cyberthreat Report"
Virtually all software, applications, systems and devices are now connected to the Internet. This is a reality that cybercriminals recognize and are actively exploiting. Some 94 percent of medical institutions said their organizations have been victims of a cyber attack, according to the Ponemon Institute. Now, with the push to digitize all health care records, the emergence of…
Department of Veterans Affairs was warned privacy breach was practically unavoidable
Joe Camp reports that the I-Team kept digging into the recent eBenefits breach, and came across an interesting document: The I-Team has uncovered documents revealing the Department of Veterans Affairs was warned that a privacy breach, like the one ABC11 exposed last month, was “practically unavoidable because of problems with the VA’s information technology system.”…
IN: St. Vincent Hospital notifies 1,100 patients that stolen laptop contained protected health information
St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis is part of St. Vincent Health. A statement uploaded today and linked from the hospital’s homepage says: St.Vincent officials sent letters to approximately 1,100 patients informing them that a laptop connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine and functioning as a medical device was detached and stolen from the hospital on…
Electronic Health Data Breaches Remain Primary Concern Despite Increased Use of Security Technologies and Analytics – Survey
From HIMSS: Results of the 2013 HIMSS Security Survey show that, despite progress toward hardened security and use of analytics, more work must be done to mitigate insider threat, such as the inappropriate access of data by employees. Although federal initiatives such as OCR audits, Meaningful Use and the HIPAA Omnibus Rule continue to encourage healthcare organizations…
Blue Shield of California notifies agents that their SSN was exposed
Blue Shield of California is notifying some agents that their Tax Identification Numbers – which are often the agents’ Social Security Numbers – were accidentally disclosed to some of the agents’ clients who attempted to pay their bills online. In a letter dated today, BSC writes that the problem with SSN exposure existed between December…