Ann Costantino reports: A massive security flaw has been detected that allowed unrestricted access to highly sensitive records pertaining to students, staff and internal school system data on a Baltimore County Public Schools (BCPS) public facing website. The system’s BCPS One/Schoology platform, where students are able to access classes, grades and academic resources online, is…
Category: U.S.
Aetna first notifying 238 Virginia employees of BenefitMall breach that they’ve known about since December, 2018?
In January, 2019, we learned about a breach at Centerstone Insurance and Financial Services, Inc. d/b/a BenefitMall, a business associate. The breach reportedly affected more than 111,000 insurance members/covered employees of the vendor’s clients. HIPAA Journal covered the incident. Yesterday, Aetna issued a public notice related to the incident. Surprisingly, their notice discloses that by…
Kansas hospital pays $250K to settle charges it falsified EHR security risk assessment
Nathan Eddy reports: Coffey Health System, a 25-bed critical access hospital in Kansas, has agreed to pay a $250,000 settlement for alleged False Claims Act violations related to its meaningful use attestation. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Justice charged that the hospital falsely attested that it had conducted the necessary security assessment to comply with…
Unsurprisingly, big numbers from the AMCA breach are starting to be revealed
On May 10, when DataBreaches.net first reported that the American Medical Collection Agency had been breached, we reported that information from 200,000 payment cards had been found for sale on a top-tier market by Gemini Advisory analysts, whose investigation linked those cards to AMCA. At the time, we did not know how many other payment…
Premera Reaches Proposed $74M Settlement Over 2014 Breach of 11M
Jessica Davis reports: Premera Blue Cross reached a proposed $74 million settlement with the 11 million patients impacted by its 2014 breach, caused by a sophisticated cyberattack that lasted for nearly one year before it was discovered. In January 2015, Premera officials discovered the breach that began nearly a year earlier in May 2014. Premera, Premera…
Understanding When Business Associates Are Directly Liable Under HIPAA
Aimee Jachym and Samantha A. Kopacz of Miller Canfield PLC write: New guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) reaffirms that business associates must have proper HIPAA compliance practices, safeguards and documentation in place in order to avoid costly penalties. OCR recently released a Fact…