The UD Department of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights got about 21 reports in November 2017. According to the reports, the healthcare data theft affected 500+ individuals. Although the breach report fell in the December. When there was a decrease in the number of theft records, there was a surprisingly increase in the number of patients affected. The number of affected individuals increased to 107,143 from 71,377.
The reasons for the healthcare data theft in November 2017
In the month of November, there was a record of IT breaches, the unauthorized expose of information, the loss or the theft of the information, the theft of the devices containing the information and much more. There were about 6 breaches records for each issue. There has also been reported 3 more issues about the exposure of the PHI of the patients by improper means.
According to the historical records, there were two large data thefts reported in the month of November. It contained the theft of 32,000 information at Pulmonary Specialists of Louisville and 16,474 data theft at Hackensack Sleep and Pulmonary Center. Both of these cases were the hacking issues. In the first case, the theft was committed by the unauthorized person by accessing the medical records of the patients through electronic means. On the other case, the attacker accessed the data through Ransomware attack.
The 7 breach reports in November affected 5000+ patients for their personal information. The average (mean) of the number of people affected was 5,102 while the median of those breaches was 1,551.
The Location of the stolen or the exposed PHI
The OCR breach alerted the institutes for the physical security of make sure the confidentiality of the data in the form of paper. In the month of November or December, there were many incidents of data theft reported through paper records. According to the recent survey of HMSS, the cyberattacks using emails was the most common method used by the attackers to get the data records of the patients and misuse it.
The healthcare data theft in November by State
There has been many breaches reported in different states. The count shows that there were 15 states in total that were affected by the crime. Kentucky was the state that was highly affected by the data breaches. The report shows there were 3 crime reports in total.
