A thousand incidents and counting, the federal health breach tally hits an all-time high, now listing 1,010 major breaches reported since federal regulators started to track them in September 2009 after the HITECH Act came into effect. These breaches have together affected 31.5 million individuals. The noteworthy fact is that out of these, more than…
The healthcare information breach tally continues to rises steadily despite security regulations and associated legal action. And the latest data breach to grab the headlines is the Montana Breach, where hackers gained access to a health department server, compromising the information of 1.3 million individuals on a DPHHS (Department of Public Health and Human Services)…
Although there has been enough and more said about the importance of encryption in safeguarding protected health information (PHI), data breaches resulting due to lack of encryption seem to still be occurring. Almost every other day there is a new headline about a healthcare institution or a hospital encountering a HIPAA breach. It is disturbing…
Breach prevention is a crucial goal for every healthcare entity. While you want to avoid the pain caused to your organization in the event of a breach, you also want to protect the interest of your patients and health plan members. Moreover, the higher penalties for violating HIPAA, combined with the growing number of state-specific…
No organization can afford to take the risk of inadequate data protection. Protecting sensitive data should be a top priority for businesses, because a data breach can not only turn out to be very expensive, but can also result in embarrassment and additional scrutiny. So it is important to take a proactive approach to prevent…
With the ‘Wall of Shame’ having a fewer number of breaches added in the past month, and the breaches of 2013 so far being much smaller than the alarming numbers of the past year, there was a sense of mild relief felt in the healthcare sector. But cases that have surfaced during the last few…
The number of data breaches in the healthcare industry seems to be steadily rising. Two more incidents have now been added to the long list of breaches. According to Sacremento TV station KCRA, the state of California posted the Social Security Numbers of nearly 14,000 Medical providers working for the In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS), by…
Curbing data breaches is still an unachieved target for the healthcare industry, according to two reports published by the Ponemon Institute and the Health Information Trust Alliance last week. In their third annual study on patient privacy and data security, Ponemon’s Institute determined that almost 94 percent of the 80 healthcare organizations that participated in…
No company is guarded from security threats. This seems to be the norm with hackers finding new targets every day, the latest being Barnes & Noble. It has come to light that hackers have stolen credit card information of customers who shopped at 63 Barnes & Noble stores across the country even as early as…
The tally of healthcare information breaches seems to be steadily increasing despite security regulations and associated legal action. The breach tally is soon to exceed 20 million once three recent breach incidents are added. With 410 incidents affecting nearly 19.2 million individuals since September 2009, the breach tally is now already at a record high.…
