August 2016 Cyber Security Summary
September 1, 2016
Cyber Security Summary – August 2016
August was not a good month for healthcare cyber security! The month ended up having an extremely high amount of compromised healthcare records, with two different data breaches consisting of over 3,000,000 compromised records each.
August 2016 Healthcare Data Breach Summary:
Cyber Security Since The Beginning of 2016:
Since the beginning of the year there have been 638 total data breaches, 187 of which were in the healthcare field which has resulted in over 13,000,000 records stolen in the healthcare industry!
Healthcare Data Breaches Highlights from August 2016:
The Insurance Companies
A company based out of New York, which provides ID cards for insurance companies, was involved in a data breach where over 3 million records were compromised. The data contained the members’ names, mailing addresses and dates of birth. As of now, there is no evidence that suggests that the data is being used inappropriately, however Blue Cross and Blue Shield, who were among the companies that were affected, are offering two years of identity protection services to their customers at no charge.
The Health System
As we touched on in our last cyber security summary, a healthcare facility in Arizona was the victim of a huge data breach in the beginning of August. The breach included a variety of different information including names, social security numbers, addresses and dates of birth, previous medical services, and even credit card information from individuals who purchased items from the food and beverage outlets! This was one on the largest hospital breached to date.
Employee’s Info
An Anesthesiology group who is also based out of Arizona discovered a cyberattack consisting of almost 900,000 records that took place sometime between March and June. A computer forensics team was hired to conduct an investigation on the incident however, no unauthorized use of the data has been reported so far. Names, addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and even employee tax and financial information were among the information that was stolen.
