Posts Tagged ‘Data Breach’

Security Prescription: Take Note of New HIPAA Rules

Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

 

Changes are afoot in the health care industry. New HIPAA regulations were unveiled last month to ramp up patients’ privacy and access rights. One of the important new patient access rights is that individuals can now request a copy of their electronic medical records to be sent, well, electronically. I don’t know about you, but long ago my doctors traded in clipboards and pens for computers, iPads and mobile devices, capturing my personal health information via a simple, touchscreen interface. So, it only makes sense that as individuals we should be able to access our electronically stored personal medical data and play a more active role in how our medical-related information is communicated and managed.

The new HIPAA regulations also introduce increased penalties for HIPAA noncompliance. With data breaches continuing to make headlines, the penalty for negligence in protecting health information (PHI) now carries a maximum penalty of $1.5 million per violation.

From an individual’s perspective the new HIPAA regulations are excellent news.  Now it is mandated that we can easily get a copy of our own medical records, while at the same time organizations are being held increasingly accountable for protecting this sensitive information.

The new HIPAA rules also mean that health care organizations must have a secure file sharing and transfer method in place for sharing medical records with patients or risk paying the price in terms of hefty HIPAA fines .

Many of the leading healthcare organizations already use Accellion secure file sharing to ensure HIPAA compliance.  Read more about how one of the top U.S. hospitals turned to Accellion to boost data security, share vast amounts of information, and support ongoing HIPAA compliance.

If your organization hasn’t had a secure file sharing health checkup in the past year, please contact us for a confidential review of your current systems.  We are here to help.

 

 

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Trick or Breach: Frightening Spike in Data Security Incidents

Wednesday, October 31st, 2012

Who’s lurking around your valuable data? According to new figures from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the U.K., your organization’s risk for a breach has increased by a startling percent.

Here’s the spooktacular data they found:

  • In the past five years, data security breaches have increased more than 1000 percent in the U.K.
  • The industry hit hardest is local government, with breaches increasing by 1609 percent; followed by public sector (1308%); and private sector (1159%)
  • The ICO has issued nearly £2 million of fines from July 2011 to 2012 – more than three times the amount of penalties from the previous year

These numbers were reinforced in the United States in Verizon’s 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report that reported 855 incidents and 174 million compromised records.

Verizon’s annual report includes more incidents, derived from more contributors, and represents a broader and more diverse scope. The number of compromised records across these incidents skyrocketed back up to 174 million after reaching an all-time low in last year’s report .In fact, the 2012 report boasts the second-highest data loss total since Verizon started keeping track in 2004.

Nick Banks, head of EMEA and APAC operations for Imation Mobile Security told Help Net Security, “Organizations must take responsibility for preventing breaches, and with so much available technology there really is no excuse for failing to adequately protect data.”

Nick’s right. Safeguarding corporate data has to be at the top of organizations’ priority lists. With tools like Accellion, comprehensive enterprise security is attainable, affordable, and easier than ever – providing a safe way for users to share information, while ensuring files don’t end up in the wrong hands.

It’s time to turn this trend in the opposite direction. Who’s in?

We do our part to help Accellion’s customers and their business users protect data while sharing files with external and internal users.

As for the haunts of Halloween… there is nothing that can help the chills and thrills.

 

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Three Lessons Learned from Colossal Government Data Breach

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

Does the name Bradley Manning mean anything to you? If you’re a government organization, the name is synonymous with “colossal data breach” – as Manning spearheaded the biggest leak of classified information in our nation’s history.

To briefly recap, Manning, a U.S. Army soldier, single handedly accessed more than 900,000 intelligence documents, including daily war logs from military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he did it by downloading files onto CDs labeled “Lady Gaga”, which he shared with the whistleblower site, WikiLeaks.

According to Manning’s published chat logs, the event was “childishly easy”; “no one expected a thing”; and the “weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counter-intelligence, and inattentive signal analysis created a perfect storm.”

With Manning’s trial just a few months away, we take a look back to share three important lessons learned from this monumental event:

Lesson #1: DLP is Important: While Manning had access to a classified network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, having a data loss prevention (DLP) solution in place that scanned information, across all network points before it left the network, would have provided an additional line of defense to prevent the data from being downloaded – to a CD, flash drive, or any other storage mechanism.

Lesson #2: It’s Time to Cast a Wider Security Net: Because most government agencies are large, data security can be focused on the “core” or interior of the network versus the perimeter of the organization. But, big data security challenges arise as employees have new ways to view and share confidential data – via BYOD movements, wireless access points, and consumer-based, third-party file sharing sites. Now that networks have become more decentralized, agencies need to deploy a wider “net” to secure and manage data.

Lesson #3: Security and Large File Size Aren’t Mutually Exclusive: Large data transfers are not only common within the government domain, they are often required. But how are agencies securing and managing that data?  And, can large files be shared simply and on demand? To address these needs, organizations are turning to mobile file sharing solutions that give employees the ability to send and synchronize large, classified and confidential documents with ease, while giving IT the security, authentication, encryption and file tracking and reporting capabilities necessary to support data security best practices.

These are three key lessons to remember as we move into 2013 and strive to keep newsworthy security breaches a part of our past, fully protecting government data exchanges of the future.

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2011 Data Breach Rewind

Thursday, December 29th, 2011

Accellion

361 million >> 144 million >> 4 million that’s the total number of records compromised each year from 2008 – 2010 as a result of data breaches, according to a joint Verizon and United States Secret Service report. After years of increasing losses climaxing in 2008 with a record-setting 361 million records compromised, it was not clear if the 2009 drop to 144 million was an aberration or a sign of things to come. The 2010 total of four million compromised records seems to suggest it was a sign. But of what? And is it a lasting change or a temporary deviation?

Unfortunately, a new report from the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse notes 535 data breaches during 2011, involving 30.4 million compromised records. That’s up from 2011, and it’s just a conservative estimate, since not all data breaches see the light of day. “Because many states do not require companies to report data breaches to a central clearinghouse, data breaches occur that we never hear about,” said PRC director Beth Givens in the report.

In 2011 millions of people were affected by serious data breaches at major corporations and organizations like: Epsilon, Alliance Data Systems, Sony PlayStation, WordPress.com, University of South Carolina, and Tripadvisor/Expedia. These breaches of sensitive information reinforce the need for enterprise-class, secure content delivery solutions at organizations of all of sizes, regardless of industry.

Our New Year’s wish for every enterprise organization is a year free of data breaches.  Of course to make this wish come true we encourage everyone to eliminate unsecure file sharing as a source of data breaches. Make implementing Accellion file sharing part of your New Year’s resolution.

Schwartz, M. J. (2011, December 28). 6 worst data breaches of 2011. Retrieved from http://informationweek.com/news/security/attacks/232301079

Verizon. (2011, May 05). 2011 verizon data breach investigations report. Retrieved from http://www.verizonbusiness.com/Products/security/dbir/

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Data breaches put the scare back in Halloween!

Monday, October 31st, 2011

For most people outside the IT profession, the scariest thing they deal with on Halloween is a spooky costume or the newest episode of AMC’s ghastly drama “The Walking Dead.” For IT professionals, a data breach is far worse. With the frequency and cost of data breaches on the rise, it’s easy to see why the topic worries IT professionals. In its fifth annual TITLE survey the Ponemon Institute showed a significant spike in legal defense spending to address fears of successful class actions resulting from customer, consumer or employee data loss. In fact, the total cost per data breach incident now exceeds six million dollars.

If that’s not enough to chill IT and security professionals, another report commissioned by Websense surveyed 100 IT managers around the world about the latest threats to corporate security. The IT managers surveyed went on to say that data loss incidents put their jobs on the line, and that managing the stress of a company data breach is more taxing than divorce, managing personal debt, or a minor car accident.

There were 561 data breaches in 2010 and 589 data breaches to date this year. To avoid the stress of a data breach, IT professionals are employing robust security strategies to ease their worries.

We do our part to help Accellion’s customers and their business users protect data while sharing files with external and internal users.

As for the haunts of Halloween… there is nothing that can help the chills and thrills.

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