Data security news and information

The phrase "health insurance" may conjure up images of medical bills for some people, but for hackers it leads only to visions of dollar signs.
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Technology industry association leaders who testified Thursday before a House subcommittee hearing on whether legislation is needed for data breach reporting called for Congress to pre-empt state laws on data breaches. But at least one witness opposed such preemption.
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Unauthorized peeking at patient medical records remains an unsolved problem among healthcare providers, and privacy experts contend it's just in our nature to snoop.
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Be careful what you search for. Dr. Marco Huesch, writing in the online letters section of the July 8 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, reports on a privacy experiment he ran recently on 20 popular healthcare websites.
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Two northern California healthcare organizations have sent letters to more than 17,000 patients notifying them that their personally identifiable medical records have been exposed in separate breach incidents. Meanwhile, links between one of the breaches and a meth amphetamine investigation may...
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The Food and Drug Administration issued a notice on Thursday asking medical device manufacturers and healthcare facilities to introduce controls that would guard against cyber-attacks on medical equipment and hospital networks.
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Definition: spy – n. 1.) A person who keeps close and secret watch on another or others.
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At least eight foreign-sponsored organizations, mostly connected to the Chinese military, have hacked into computer networks at the Veterans Affairs Department in recent years or were actively trying to do so, a former VA computer security chief told Congress this week.
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HIPAA isn't just for healthcare providers anymore. The federal law that requires your doctor to protect your privacy soon will apply to other organizations that come in contact with patient data.
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Outliers is gonna file this one under “Physician, heal thyself.” It seems one of the more prominent organizations devoted to health IT data security ran into a little data security lapse. Yes, the Health Information Trust Alliance got hacked. Oops.
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