The Department of Health and Human Services has issued a new proposed rule to better align the HIPAA privacy and breach notification rules with regulations involving the confidentiality of records pertaining to patients receiving treatment for substance use disorders.
Healthcare providers and their vendors often fear federal regulatory action, but do fines and corrective action many any difference at all? As breach cases have nearly doubled since 2018, federal fines dropped 93% in 2022, and some say the agency is understaffed and crippled by legal challenges.
An Indiana healthcare network, Community Health Network, is the latest medical entity to classify its use of online tracking code as a data breach reportable to federal regulators. It said the unauthorized access/disclosure breach affected 1.5 million individuals.
While the cybercrime story for 2022 has yet to be fully written, cryptocurrency theft will no doubt have a starring role. Buoyed by the collective pilfering of billions of dollars' worth of cryptocurrency this year, what's to stop attackers from doubling down in 2023?
As the U.S. celebrates Thanksgiving, let's give thanks for this cybercrime karma: For more than two years, law enforcement and security experts have been exploiting flaws in the crypto-locking malware to help victims decrypt their systems without paying a ransom.
Authorities charged six people, including five former Tennessee hospital workers, with conspiracy in disclosing health data. Federal prosecutors say the six sold information about patients involved in motor vehicle accidents to third parties, including chiropractors and personal injury attorneys.
Data breaches are tricky to cover, and we want to report on them in an ethical way. That requires picking what should be reported for informed public discourse but avoiding topics that may encourage attackers' efforts to shame victims into paying a ransom and anything resembling data dump voyeurism.
A server misconfiguration at Kentucky-based CorrectCare Integrated Health Inc., a firm that provides medical claims processing for correctional facilities, has exposed sensitive information of nearly 600,000 inmates who received medical care during the last decade while incarcerated.
A New York-based firm that provides anesthesiology administrative services to 100 surgery centers and medical offices across the U.S. is facing at least five proposed federal class action lawsuits following a July hacking incident that affected some of its clients and over 450,000 of their patients.
A recent ransomware attack at a Texas hospital that knocked out phone and email systems for weeks is now even worse following OakBend Medical Center's admission that the hackers downloaded data from the medical records of up to 500,000 individuals.
A U.S. federal district judge said users would be "shocked to realize" that Facebook collects patient data. Plaintiffs suing the social media giant asked the judge to enjoin the company from intercepting health data and communications through its Pixel web tracking tool embedded into patent portals.
The stark consequences of ransomware became painfully clear in Australia this week as attackers began releasing data from health insurer Medibank, one of the country's largest health insurers. Also, leaked chat logs reveal how the attackers accessed Medibank's systems.
A Georgia-based home health and hospice provider will pay $425,000 to Massachusetts to settle litigation stemming from a 2020 breach affecting about 166,000 individuals nationwide. The agreement comes shortly after Aveanna Healthcare settled a proposed class action lawsuit in federal district court.
Tributes are being paid to Vitali Kremez, who has died at the age of 34 in a suspected scuba-diving accident. The renowned threat intelligence expert, born in Belarus, had long tracked Russian cybercrime syndicates and was part of an ad hoc group established to counter ransomware and help victims.
Federal regulators have issued new guidance explaining how they will consider the "recognized security practices" of healthcare entities and their business associates during HIPAA enforcement activities, such as breach investigations and security audits.
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