The Department of Veterans Affairs October report to Congress on data incidents is available online. Here are some breaches of note contained in the report: A Regional Office (RO) guard at the Veterans Benefits Administration in Tennessee found an unencrypted thumb drive inside the facility doors on October 8. The guard took the drive home…
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NZ: Doctor to keep fighting privacy complaint
Here’s a case where a healthcare provider is maintaining that a privacy breach was necessary to protect the health and safety of others: An Invercargill doctor is refusing to settle over a privacy complaint, saying it would be “moral cowardice”. Robert Henderson is due to appear before the Human Rights Tribunal on November 30 for…
Three new breaches revealed by HHS/OCR
While I was away, I see that there was another update to HHS’s breach tool web page: Debra C. Duffy, a dentist in Texas, reported that 4,700 patients were notified of a breach that occurred on August 5 that involved the theft a laptop. I do not see a notice on her web site, so…
UK: Security alert over NHS data breach
Alison Dayani reports: A severe security alert has been issued over confidential NHS medical records of every Birmingham patient being left open to breach, the Birmingham Post can reveal. The National Information Commissioner has ordered an investigation into access of IT files held by Birmingham Primary Care Shared Services Agency, which holds all staff and…
Jury Awards Woman $100K Over Before-and-After Cosmetic Surgery Photos
Dan O’Connor reports: Before-and-after neck-to-knees photos of a 64-year-old cosmetic surgery patient that somehow appeared in a newspaper article about her surgeon without her permission are at the center of a federal lawsuit in St. Louis. Last November, a jury awarded $100,000 to the plaintiff, identified in court records only as Jane Doe from Bartow,…
While everyone's discussing the cost of breaches to hospitals…
Not surprisingly, a lot of the headlines from the Ponemon study are that American hospitals spend about $6 billion/year due to data breaches, or around $1 million+ per hospital/per year. But the costs of a data breach that result in a lawsuit are considerably higher. In talking with Rick Kam, the President of ID Experts,…