Outsourcing Breach Response Lowers Costs
By Doug Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer for ID Experts
The Ponemon Institute last month released their 5th annual 2009 Annual Study: Cost of Data Breach. This year, the report explored several new areas and came up with some interesting and in some cases surprising conclusions…
On Managing Your Own Health Records
By Doug Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer for ID Experts
Microsoft HealthVault is designed to let us collect, store, and share health information critical to our family’s well-being and Google Health allows us to organize our health information all in one place, gather our medical records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, and share our information securely with a family member, doctors or caregiver. For now, I probably won’t start trusting my medical history to either Microsoft or Google…
Healthcare Data Breaches Slow To Surface
By Doug Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer for ID Experts
The 2009 ITRC Breach Report had captured numerous healthcare data breaches since the September 23rd effective date for the HITECH Act. So, I’m perplexed as to why there aren’t any data breaches over 500 individuals yet listed by HHS. Surprisingly, there is nothing there.
HITECH Act and Protecting Health Privacy
By Doug Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer for ID Experts
These new regulations come at a time when healthcare breaches are on the rise; according to the 2009 ITRC Breach Stats Report healthcare breaches account for over 66 percent of all records breached this year, up from 20 percent in 2008. In fact, some of the largest names in healthcare suffered data breaches.
Report: Data Breaches Hike Fraud Risk 400%
By Doug Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer for ID Experts
This report should be heeded by those banks, health care organizations, government agencies, insurance companies and others that we entrust with our social security and checking account numbers, birth dates and mothers’ maiden names, and in some cases our personal health information.
Protecting Your Privacy After You Die
By Rebecca Herold (The Privacy Professor) CIPP, CISSP, CISM, CISA, FLMI
Do surviving relatives have a right to read their deceased son’s, daughter’s, husband’s or wife’s communications with other people whose lives could then subsequently be completely altered as a result? What would your email service providers do with all your messages? Who should make that decision, and when should that decision be made?
Tools for Quantifying Risk Exposure are Few
By Doug Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer for ID Experts
The seeming inconsistency between the perception of being immune from data breach risks with the rapid growth in data breach incidents, led us to think about whether organizations can actually quantify their level of breach risk. We were somewhat surprised that there is not much available to organizations to help them in scoring their vulnerability.
Medical Data Breach Reports Likely to Soar
By Doug Pollack, Chief Marketing Officer for ID Experts
In recent years, the number of reported data breaches at healthcare organizations has soared, despite laws requiring the groups to protect patient information. In May, a hacker stole more than 500,000 patient records from a state-run database that tracks drug prescriptions in Virginia — and then demanded a ransom to return the information.
ISR News: HIPAA and Your Health Records
Excerpts From Search Security
Healthcare is unique in that storage of electronic health records is highly distributed between primary care physicians, specialist doctors, hospitals, and insurance/HMO organizations. Information has to be efficiently shared among these entities with great sensitivity towards patient privacy and legitimate claims processing. Patients want to prevent over zealous employers from performing unauthorized background checks on medical history; claim processors want to prevent paying fraudulent claims arising from targeted patient identity theft.
ISR News: Anatomy of a Data Breach
Excerpts From BankInfoSecurity.com
“Once the intruder is on the network and able to move around, there is oftentimes a system of downloading hacker tools, and the tools do a couple of different things. Sometimes they go and look at passwords or try to find passwords, and sometimes they are simply devices to capture sensitive information and maybe store it in a certain file somewhere on the network. And then lastly there is another series of hacker tools that are downloaded and installed and the point they have, the purpose of being used to export the sensitive information over the internet through remote computers that the intruder controls. Sometimes the export occurs over an extended period of time.”
