These incidents, which include ransomware and phishing attacks – as well as misconfigured IT – are the culprits in nearly two-thirds of the 81 major health data breaches that have been added to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website so far this year.Those 51 hackingIT incidents affected nearly
A proposed $7.5 million settlement of a class action lawsuit filed against ULCA Health in the wake of a 2015 cyberattack that affected 4.5 million individuals stands apart from most other breach-related settlements because it requires the organization to spend a substantial sum on improving its security, says attorney Steven Teppler.Under terms of the settlement,
A medical software vendors unsecured fax server leaked patients medical information, highlighting yet again the importance of vendor risk management. Sacramento, Calif.-based Meditab Software Inc., which provides fax services and other services for healthcare providers, leaked the patient records through a fax server that was hosted by a subdomain of one of its affiliate companies,
No other Spectrum Health care facilities were affected. ST. JOSEPH, MI — About 60,000 patients of Spectrum Health Lakeland in St. Joseph may have had their names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other personal information jeopardized by a data breach.The breach does not impact patients of other Spectrum Health care facilities, according to health system
The personal information of about 45,000 patients at Rush System for Health has been compromised due to a data breach at one of the health systems third-party claims processing vendors.The data breach, first reported by Crains Chicago Business, was disclosed in a Rush financial filing (PDF). The breach, which Rush learned about on Jan. 22,
In one incident, an employee at Rutland Regional Medical Center in Vermont noticed unusual activity with their email account and reported it to the medical center’s IT department. In the other incident, a former employee of Kentucky Counseling Center in Louisville reported to the mental health services provider that they had received an email containing
The total number of breaches is at a three-year low, but the incidents are larger, affect more people and are often caused by underprotected IT environments, according to a new Bitglass report. While the number of healthcare breaches has decreased in recent years, the number of individuals affected by such breaches skyrocketed in 2018, according
UW Medicine says in a statement that on Dec. 26, 2018, it became aware of a vulnerability on a website server that made protected internal files available and visible by search on the internet on Dec. 4, 2018.The mistake was discovered by a patient who was conducting a Google search for their own name and
In todays healthcare industry, patient portals are a must-have, if you want to keep your customers happy. Creating portals is easy, protecting patients data from hackers isnt so easy. In this guest post, Victoria Dames, senior director of product management at a company that provides consumer and business credit reporting and marketing services, offers four
A majority of organizations are not confident in their ability to avoid major data breaches according to a new study. A majority of organizations are not confident in their ability to avoid major data breaches according to a new study.The report for breach avoidance company Balbix, based on research from the Ponemon Institute, shows that
