Are You Prepared? Here comes Ian, expecting to hit Florida soon. Use this as a wake-up call to review your own emergency preparedness. Many of you have recently experienced natural disasters. Be it hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, or fires, being prepared counts when it matters most. Those of us in the healthcare profession have more to […]
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Old age and cybersecurity We all know many things don’t work as well as they(we) age. It’s a fact of life most of us face. While age impacts us personally, the systems around us are also impacted by age. A recent study by cybersecurity firm Coalfire discovered that our older business equipment poses one of […]
The Importance of Patching Most of us know about patch Tuesday – the second Tuesday of every month is when Microsoft releases its software patches. Most IT companies either manually update client systems or have them set to run automatically. Like most software companies, we’re accustomed to regular patch releases to help keep our systems […]
EHR & HIPAA A recent report published by Cynergistek presented data showing less than half of the nation’s healthcare institutions comply with the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF). The CSF is a best-practices roadmap for healthcare organizations to align their technologies with both HIPAA and cybersecurity conformity. But digging into the numbers […]
EULA, YOU, and HIPAA What do End User License Agreements and HIPAA have to do with each other? According to recent discoveries, a heck of a lot. It turns out apps like Meta’s Facebook and Messenger, Instagram, Tik Tok, and others, are mining your data and activity on an unprecedented scale. Here’s what we know. […]
New HIPAA guidance is on the way, here’s the good and the bad.
New HIPAA Guidance Years ago, at a HIPAA conference in DC hosted by NIST, they announced an update to 800-66 would be coming. Almost 10 years later, we now have a draft copy of this paper – 800-66r1. Why is this significant? 800-66 was the most significant guidance the government ever issued on how to […]
HIPAA and your password policy – are you compliant?
HIPAA and your password. Thanks to NIST, who in 2017 changed their recommended password policy in publication 800-63B, the change/do not change debate has been ongoing. If you aren’t familiar with the publication, here’s a short news video about it – https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-burr-passwords-guidance/ The problem with 90-day password change requirements is that we tend to create simple passwords […]
The lawsuits are flowing in the MCG Health breach. Here’s why it’s bad for you.
Vendor Risk MCG Health is a health information services company providing clinical guidelines to hospitals and other care facilities nationwide. They recently reported a breach that had occurred back in 2020, and already lawsuits from their clients are pouring in. Why does this matter to you? For most care providers, the extent of their data […]
Facebook is collecting your health information. Should you care?
Facebook is bad for your health! A report published this week by the website Newsbusters revealed some disturbing information about Facebook. The news organization ran a battery of tests against 100 US hospitals and discovered a third of them were using tools provided by Facebook (META) to facilitate online scheduling. What they discovered was anyone […]
Get ready for major HIPAA changes
HIPAA Changes Ahead In January of 2021, we reported on an amendment to the HITECH act by congress that intended to advance HIPAA compliance and enforcement. The idea was to incentivize Covered Entities to adopt best practices for cybersecurity by reducing the penalty structure for those who did so, and still suffered a breach or were […]
The hospital attack that wasn’t
How Boston Children’s dodged an attack This past week the FBI released details on a cyberattack against Boston Children’s Hospital in November of last year. Prior to the attack, CISA and others sent alerts out to the healthcare community warning stakeholders of an imminent state-sponsored cyberattack. There were no specifics to the threat given at […]
Do you prefer security or privacy? You can’t have both.
What’s Happening in Our Schools I was reading the FBI feeds recently following the horrific events in Texas last week. As more information comes to light, it’s beginning to look (once again) like the warning signs were there, and here again, was a tragedy that could have been prevented. We aren’t going to weigh in […]
HIPAA Breaches Running at Record Rate
HIPAA Breaches and You In the past 12 months, we’ve averaged over 3.3 million breached healthcare records per month. Aside from the breach of confidentiality this represents, the information in those records is used for financial fraud, insurance fraud, identity theft, and in some cases, blackmail. If it’s not happening or impacting you, it’s easy for […]
Hey, what’s your password? The Dark Web knows
Creating Better Passwords To make passwords “strong,” they must be both unique and lengthy (at least 12 characters). Generally, people are pretty bad at creating passwords that fit either category (much less both). You could let a computer do it for you and if you did, you’d probably get a strong password. Indeed, there are lots […]