Chris Bennington of Epstein Becker Green writes, in part: The HITECH Act requires OCR to issue annual reports to Congress of HIPAA breaches and complaints received by OCR during the calendar year. For 2020, OCR reported that it received 656 notifications of breaches affecting 500 or more individuals, 66,509 notifications of breaches affecting fewer than…
Category: U.S.
Wellstar Health System discloses data breach
Ariel Hart reports: Wellstar Health System suffered a data breach through its email system, it reported Friday afternoon. Wellstar said it learned two months ago that someone unauthorized had gained access to two email accounts. Via those accounts, patients’ health care information was exposed, including patient laboratory information, Wellstar said in a written statement. “After…
Whitefish School District notifies 1,663 after employee fell for social engineering scam
Whitefish School District in Montana recently reported a data breach they discovered on March 11. An investigation discovered that an employee’s computer had been accessible to an attacker because the employee had fallen for a social engineering scam. As a result, a system containing personal information was open and accessible to the attacker. That system…
Details on the Weatherford ISD data breach
DataBreaches.net has received the following statement from Charlotte LaGrone, Executive Director of Communications for Weatherford ISD, concerning the breach DataBreaches.net reported yesterday: Weatherford ISD Statement on Data Breach The confidentiality, privacy, and security of information in our care is one of our highest priorities. Despite multiple layers of processes and procedures to prevent a data…
Five ransomware groups, five victims… will it ever ease up?
The following is a snapshot of recent attacks on U.S. healthcare entities by ransomware teams. #1 First Choice Community Healthcare – Hive Hive threat actors have never sworn off attacking the healthcare sector. In addition to claiming that they attacked the Partnership HealthPlan of California on March 19 (an attack that has impacted PHPC’s functioning),…
Would Sea Mar Community Health even know about large patient data dumps if not for DataBreaches.net?
The chronology of Sea Mar Community Health Center’s responses to a massive data breach suggests that they may be first learning of data dumps because of notifications by DataBreaches.net or this site’s reporting of our discoveries. If true, what does that say about their security and incident response? A DataBreaches.net commentary. Since 2021, DataBreaches.net has…