Tag: Data Security

December 1, 2016

This week’s annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America again brought more than 50,000 radiology professionals to Chicago from around the world to look at new technologies and trends in the profession. Several trends in the use of […]

November 29, 2016

If community hospitals are a general barometer of health in the surrounding area, the emergency room is the canary in the coal mine. Viral outbreaks, increases in violence, loss of health insurance from local layoffs—all are social ills that make […]

November 28, 2016

The HHS Office for Civil Rights has once again sanctioned a healthcare provider organization for violating HIPAA privacy and security rules. The University of Massachusetts Amherst, known as UMass, will pay a $650,000 settlement fine and enter into a two-year […]

November 21, 2016

Ransomware attacks across all sectors continued to increase rapidly during the first nine months of 2016, with most organizations getting infected because an employee clicks on a malicious attachment or a bad link in an email message, according to Beazley […]

November 18, 2016

Patient safety organization ECRI Institute has launched a cyberattack gap analysis service for healthcare providers, focusing on threats to medical devices that interact with patients. The organization is using internal experts to assess a hospital’s medical device inventory for cyber-exposures […]

November 8, 2016

Healthcare organizations are becoming increasingly sensitive about the problems involved in matching multiple patient identities within the healthcare system, and most solutions rely on record linkage. However, there’s another way to look at it: what we ultimately need are tools […]

November 7, 2016

Since cybersecurity healthcare threats on hospital EHR systems have become a topic of nightly newscasts, no longer is anyone shocked by their scope and veracity. What is shocking is the financial damage the attacks are predicted to cause as they […]

November 7, 2016

A recent string of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against a variety of Web sites, driven by hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected devices, highlights new vulnerabilities and the lack of security in the rapidly growing Internet of Things (IoT) industry, according […]

November 3, 2016

With many healthcare organizations falling victim to ransomware attacks, security consulting firm Peak 10 offers 12 steps for a unified, effective approach to dealing with these potentially crippling incidents. 1.The invariable No. 1 rule – don’t pay the ransom. While […]

October 31, 2016

Any healthcare company or provider knows the obvious—hackers are working hard to get into their networks. The industry has long been in the top 10 for the number of records compromised in data breaches, and now has moved to first […]

October 27, 2016

The number of patient records breached in healthcare organizations across the United States to date is about 200 million, which is staggeringly close to three-quarters of the entire insured population. The reasons for these breaches range from hacktivism to personal/criminal/political […]

October 21, 2016

Grand Prairie, Texas-based Rainbow Children’s Clinic was the victim of a ransomware attack on its IT systems in August, affecting more than 33,000 patients, according to multiple news media reports this week. According to a notice on the patient care […]

October 10, 2016

The havoc that Ransomware creates is real, its immediate impact and implications clear: workstations are disabled, files are encrypted and systems are shut down. The screen tells you what’s wrong and how much you’ll need to pay to fix it. […]

October 3, 2016

It’s no secret that ransomware attacks are on the rise, especially in the healthcare industry. This year alone, there have already been 14 attacks on hospitals, leaving facilities without access to patient data and forcing providers to turn away patients […]

September 27, 2016

In 1996, The Spice Girls were at the top of the pop music charts. DVDs had just been launched. The number of Internet host computers increased from 1 million to 10 million. And the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act […]

September 19, 2016

Almost 90 percent of ransomware attacks during the second quarter of 2016 were on healthcare entities, according to a report by cybersecurity vendor NTTSecurity, previously Solutionary. Trailing healthcare were education (6 percent) and finance (4 percent), with attacks on all […]

September 13, 2016

CHI Franciscan Health Highline Medical Center, based in Burien, Washington, is notifying patients of a potential data breach after a vendor partner inadvertently left files containing patient information accessible via the Internet. According to a notice CHI Franciscan Health Highline […]

September 12, 2016

When the Ponemon Institute released its 2016 Global Visual Hacking Experiment, the research firm found that 91 percent of visual hacking attempts are successful. Visual hacking applies to spying on physical items, like someone’s desk, computer screen or mobile device, even […]

September 7, 2016

It was very intriguing to read an op-ed article that appeared in InfoWorld in June. Written by Roger A. Grimes, under the headline “The days of long complicated passwords are over,” it brings up some of the most current thinking […]

September 6, 2016

Big data is generated by a variety of different gadgets and sensors, including security devices. The new report from the Cloud Security Alliance — “100 Best Practices in Big Data Security and Privacy” — looks at the best practices that […]