The healthcare industry continues to get hit by data breaches. While outsiders do their share of damage in overall hacking incidents and still are to blame for the majority of the breaches, they are not always responsible. According to the Protenus October Breach Barometer report, it’s insider errors that have accounted for about 65% of affected patient records in that industry for the month. That is even though this type only accounted for 29.7% of all hacking incidents for the month.
Of nearly 250,000 records affected, that were reported to the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), over 150,000 of them were exposed due to simple mistakes. One single incident accounted for over 6,000 exposed records on its own. This was because someone sent a flyer to HIV patients about a research project accidently exposing their condition through the window of the envelope.
A separate incident involved an improperly secured cloud server that exposed health information regarding blood test results and a third was due to a misconfigured Amazon Web Services server. That one left health information exposed for over 1,500 patients.
These incidents should be a stark reminder that all organizations should prioritize training for employees on how to handle sensitive data. This is particularly true when handling healthcare data. Not only can it do irreparable damage to someone’s reputation, it could lead to insurance fraud. This type of fraud can also lead to improper healthcare decisions being made by healthcare providers who deserve to have the correct information in a patient’s file. That could be the difference between life and death.
Other noteworthy information from this report were:
- Four incidents were due to intentional insider wrongdoing accounting for exposure of 1,651 records.
- Four physical theft incidents occurred. They affected over 16,500 records.
- Two incidents of lost or missing records, affected nearly 4,000.
- Four incidents attributed to third parties or business associates. The three incidents Protenus was able to retrieve data for found that these affected 4,101 records.
It’s not just healthcare providers that experienced breaches in October. The report stated that of the 37 healthcare related breaches in the month of October, 78.4% did indeed involve a healthcare provider. However, 18.9% involved a health plan and 2.7% was related to a school.
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