Erich Falke writes: Then there were two. On March 16, 2017, the New Mexico state legislature passed a bill requiring that New Mexico residents be notified if their “personal identifying information” was affected by a breach of electronic data. Upon signature of the bill, New Mexico will join 47 other states requiring such notification, and the only…
Category: Of Note
No, you can’t defend your reputation if it means revealing PHI without the patient’s consent
Here we go again, it seems. No matter how irate you may be a patient’s bad review and no matter how unfair you think it may be, no, you cannot just reveal their protected health information without their consent – even if they revealed some of it themselves. Patrick Danner reports: A San Antonio doctor…
Central Huron Health Records Snooping Case Prosecuted
John Chippa reports: A Justice of the Peace in Goderich has handed down the stiffest fine to date in Canada for a health privacy breach. A university student who was on an educational placement with the family health team in Central Huron has been ordered to pay a $20,000 fine and a $5,000 victim surcharge…
Russian Hacker “Kolypto” Who Worked on Citadel Trojan Extradited to the US
Catalin Cimpanu reports: Yesterday, a Russian national accused of helping develop the Citadel banking trojan was arraigned in front of a US judge for the first time, after being extradited from Fredrikstad, Norway. The man’s name is Mark Vartanyan, 28, known online as Kolypto. According to US authorities, Vartanyan allegedly developed, improved and maintained the…
Justice Department charging Russian spies and criminal hackers in Yahoo intrusion
Update: The DOJ’s press release can be found here and the indictment can be found here. Ellen Nakashima reports: The Justice Department is set to announce Wednesday the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers in connection with the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first U.S. criminal cyber…
US military leak exposes ‘holy grail’ of security clearance files
Zack Whittaker reports: A unsecured backup drive has exposed thousands of US Air Force documents, including highly sensitive personnel files on senior and high-ranking officers. Security researchers found that the gigabytes of files were accessible to anyone because the internet-connected backup drive was not password protected. The files, reviewed by ZDNet, contained a range of…