Political hot potato: Irish psychiatrists have said they will not participate in any compulsory assessment of pregnant women who have suicidal ideation and are seeking an abortion. The College of Psychiatrists in Ireland said today its members will not be the country’s “social police”. Good for them! Read more on RTÉ News
Macon, Georgia Macon woman pleads guilty to stealing blood plasma donors’ identity information for tax fraud scheme
Amy Leigh Womack reports that Bridgette Williams of Macon, Georgia pleaded guilty last week in federal court to charges she stole identities of blood plasma donors while employed at BioMat USA. Womack and her co-conspirators submitted fraudulent tax returns to the tune of $191,000. According to The Telegraph, she stole more than 130 patients’ identities…
Shocking! Maharashtra admits it lost Aadhaar data of three lakh people
Data loss, but no seemingly big risk of data misuse: Maharashtra government has lost data of about three lakh people collected under the controversial Aadhaar scheme, mostly from Mumbai who enrolled into the number scheme. According to a report in the Times of India, the data containing permanent account number (PAN) and biometric information was lost…
UK: Personal data breach by police to G4S
Raymond Brown reports: An investigation was launched after private details on a massive scale were sent to controversial contractor G4S. The data breach involving personal information about more than 1,000 ‘backroom’ staff at Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire police happened amid negotiations to privatise services. […] The three forces notified the Information Commissioner’s Office in February…
Verizon releases it 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report
Verizon has released the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR). You can download the Executive Summary here and the full report here. The DBIR analyzes data from 19 organizations — covering more than 47,000 reported security incidents and 621 confirmed data breaches from the past year. Because VZ has the cooperation of so many organizations,…
What healthcare CIOs need to know from Verizon data breach report
Don Fluckinger reports: The good news: While the annual Verizon-Secret Service 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report shows that hacktivist attacks and state-sponsored espionage are on the rise, overall, healthcare organizations aren’t really prime targets for those kinds of attacks. […] The bad news: The industry has a variety of data breach prevention worries. Healthcare providers have a lot of…