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Posts Tagged ‘Encryption’
Monday, February 1st, 2010
The insurer becomes the first plan sued under a new law allowing attorneys general to enforce HIPAA privacy laws.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has filed a lawsuit against California-based Health Net, alleging the company violated federal laws protecting medical records when a portable data drive disappeared.
According to Blumenthal’s office, the Jan. 13 lawsuit is the first action by an attorney general acting under the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health, or HITECH Act (part of the 2009 federal stimulus package) to enforce privacy laws under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.
The lawsuit says the drive contained 27.7 million pages of scanned documents containing information about 446,000 enrollees and their physicians. The data was not encrypted, the lawsuit said, as required by HIPAA and by Health Net’s own corporate policy.
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
The following byline “Dispelling Data Encryption Myths: A Risk-Based Approach to Security Management” by former Protegrity CEO Gordon Rapkin appears in DBTA Magazine.
Monday, October 5th, 2009
Thousands of Windows Live Hotmail passwords have been leaked online, Microsoft has confirmed.
According to Microsoft, it “learned that several thousand Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were exposed on a third-party site” at some point over the weekend.
After learning of the breach, Microsoft “immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers,” it wrote on its Windows Live blog.
The company was quick to point out that credentials were stolen through what was “likely a phishing scheme.” The company said that it “was not a breach of internal Microsoft data.”
Monday, October 5th, 2009
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this week began notifying the participants in a federally funded mammography study that their personal information may have been breached.
Other breaches taking place at colleges and universities in 2009:
1/09: The University of Rochester reported that personal information for 450 current and former university students was stolen from a university database.
2/09: An Abilene Christian University computer server was hacked. An e-mail dated one week ago from the college’s information technology branch states that the school experienced a security breach in a database containing myACU usernames and passwords tied to the school’s internal e-mail system.
2/09: A cyber burglar crept into the University of Florida’s computer system, jeopardizing the personal information of almost 100,000 people.
6/09: Hackers broke into the computers of the Oregon University and posted a message telling President Barack Obama to stop talking about the disputed Iranian election.
7/09: The personal information of nearly 800 students who attended The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs was compromised after a faculty member’s laptop was stolen.