Patients in Manitoba are receiving notification from their healthcare providers, that their personal and sensitive information has been lost or inappropriately accessed. As all who have responsibility for the security of information, the insider threat is very real. Often times we associate the insider threat to be associated with the actions of nefarious individual. As you’ll read below, the breaches …
Data breaches in healthcare – The UW data breach
Data breach at the University of Washington – October 2013 In early October 2013 a University of Washington Medicine (UW Medicine) employee opened an email attachment and in doing so launched a piece of malicious software (aka *malware*). The employee’s computer was taken over by the malware and with that action approximately 90,000 patients had their data accessed by criminal …
Medical Device Security – Are your devices secure?
Many medical devices have telemetry requirements, which require patient data to be both present within the device’s resident memory and to be transmitted from the device to a monitoring or record-preservation device (hard drive or tape). During transmission, are the content or command/control sequences protected? Do they need to be? Unfortunately, yes. The data must be protected not only from a PHI-data disclosure perspective, but also from data corruption perspective.