Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports: European police suspect a 29-year-old man of keeping one million people offline. They might have found the person behind the notorious hacker known as BestBuy. At the end of last year, hackers took over hundreds of thousands of home routers using a variant of the infamous Internet of Things malware known as Mirai. Then they rented out…
Category: Of Note
Will a Pending OCR Rule Impact Breach Class-Action Suits?
Marianne Kolbasuk McGee A pending federal regulation – called for under the HITECH Act – that would allow regulators to share with breach victims money collected in HIPAA violation cases eventually could have implications in class-action breach lawsuits, says privacy attorney Adam Greene. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights “is working on a new…
Vets lose privacy lawsuit against VA after unencrypted data is stolen from hospital
Patrick O’Neill reports: After multiple thefts and data breaches related to the unencrypted personal information of 7,400 U.S. veterans out of a Veterans Affairs hospital, an appeals court dismissed a lawsuit this month in which patients alleged violations of the Privacy Act and Administrative Procedure Act. The veterans claimed at least seventeen more data breaches have occurred at Wm….
The CoPilot Provider Support Services incident: The HIPAA issue
In the first part of a discussion of an incident reported by CoPilot Provider Support Services, this site reported claims by John Witkowski, a former employee, that CoPilot had not reported accurately on the incident. In this part, we focus on just one of CoPilot’s claims – that they are not a business associate under HIPAA….
OCR investigating CoPilot Provider Support Services breach; former employee lodged complaint
When CoPilot Provider Support Services recently disclosed a security incident that they had known about since 2015, their statements might have led you to believe that a disgruntled former employee had hacked them or misused previously authorized access, and that law enforcement might be looking into criminal charges. If you thought that, you were wrong on both counts. CoPilot Provider Support Services (“CoPilot”) describes itself…
Turkey Arrests Journalist For Reporting On Hack
Efe Kerem Sözeri reports: Turkey, already in the midst of a crackdown on the media, has arrested a journalist for reporting on hacked emails that revealed apparent corruption in the country’s government. His colleagues say he may have been caught after sharing a group direct message on Twitter with a hacker group and several fellow journalists….