Writing for IBM Midsize Insider, Christopher Burgess speaks to the downside of data loss to Small Medium Businesses. Preferred business practices dictate cybe rsecurity, but data protection methodologies are a requirement for endpoint devices that contain customer data to protect against the possibility of a data breach/data loss. Customer data is among the most precious of all data within …
Defining the causes of a data breach
I recently crafted a piece for Huffington Post, What’s a data breach, in which I defined the vagaries of the different types of causes of a data breach. While I list the different types, I welcome opinion on others, and urge you to read the Huffington Post piece for specific examples which ended in a data breach. Stolen …
Patient Data: The Crown Jewels (Mayo Blog)
I have always been an advocate of protecting one’s personal information and privacy and was personally pleased when the HIPAA standards came into being, as this raised the tide for all medical care providers to a common level of information protection. Indeed doctors, dentists, insurers, health organizations, hospitals and clinics all moved to have their data handling and storage reviewed and certified as being HIPAA compliant.
Sadly, being compliant is not synonymous with being secure. According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse there have been more than 87 separate data breaches made public from January 1 – June 10, 2011, which in aggregate affected more than 5,000,000 individuals’ records. Let’s look at the variety of ways patient data were compromised and how every one of these losses was avoidable.