How Boston Children’s dodged an attack This past week the FBI released details on a cyberattack against Boston Children’s Hospital in November of last year. Prior to the attack, CISA and others sent alerts out to the healthcare community warning stakeholders of an imminent state-sponsored cyberattack. There were no specifics to the threat given at …
What’s Happening in Our Schools I was reading the FBI feeds recently following the horrific events in Texas last week. As more information comes to light, it’s beginning to look (once again) like the warning signs were there, and here again, was a tragedy that could have been prevented. We aren’t going to weigh in …
Do you prefer security or privacy? You can’t have both. Read More »
HIPAA Breaches and You In the past 12 months, we’ve averaged over 3.3 million breached healthcare records per month. Aside from the breach of confidentiality this represents, the information in those records is used for financial fraud, insurance fraud, identity theft, and in some cases, blackmail. If it’s not happening or impacting you, it’s easy for …
Creating Better Passwords To make passwords “strong,” they must be both unique and lengthy (at least 12 characters). Generally, people are pretty bad at creating passwords that fit either category (much less both). You could let a computer do it for you and if you did, you’d probably get a strong password. Indeed, there are lots …
HIPAA violations are on the rise. Although we didn’t hear too much about breach-related HIPAA violations during the pandemic, incidents were occurring, and the violations are now being pursued and published. The result is a steady stream of penalty announcements coming from OCR that should get everyone’s attention. Most recently, MetroHealth System in Ohio announced …
OCR is making HIPAA changes, are you ready? Earlier today the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a Request For Information to its constituents (that’s us) soliciting feedback for potential changes in two areas. The first area relates to cybersecurity, and the second is regarding the disbursement of civil monetary penalties to harmed individuals. The …
Critical Update Alert Recently Microsoft and Google released a critical security update to their browsers. Since you likely use these browsers in your environment, you need to ensure that they stay up to date. Below we have included sets of instructions for updating these browsers. Please follow the guides for both browsers and perform these updates …
You need Windows 11 – NOW Another Intel chip, another iPhone, Galaxy, Chromebook, etc., it seems we’re always being presented with the latest and greatest version of the technology we’re using. While most updated software and devices are feature-packed with nice-to-have additions, the choice to update is often driven by desire, rather than necessity. In …
What happened to your data in 2021 We haven’t heard much about HIPAA in the past few years while the healthcare industry and regulators grappled with managing and responding to the COVID crisis. But that distraction has proven to be an ideal opportunity for hackers. In healthcare, Protenus released a new study, the 2022 Protenus …
Email Mistakes It has happened again, and it won’t be the last time. The City of Boston just received their egg-in-the-face award for sending an email to all their recently-tested-positive Covid patients instructing them on the City’s policies regarding quarantine and testing going forward. No harm, no foul, except they included all of the recipients …