HHS Office for Civil Rights Director Melanie Fontes Rainer on Progress and News at OCR
ERISA Blog | Changes to the HIPAA Privacy Rules A Primer for Self-Insured Group Health Plans
Podcast - Data Privacy and Tracking Technology Compliance
Patient Data and Privacy
2022 DSIR Deeper Dive: OCR’s Right of Access Initiative
HIPAA Tips With Williams Mullen - Telehealth After the Pandemic
Relaxed HIPAA Restrictions For Providers Using Telehealth
Webinar: Investigating and Resolving Sexual Assaults on Campus
On July 19, Change Healthcare Ince. filed a breach report with HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) concerning its mammoth ransomware attack and breach. The organization’s breach report to OCR identifies just 500 individuals as...more
Cyber, Privacy, and Technology Report - Welcome to your monthly rundown of all things cyber, privacy, and technology, where we highlight all the happenings you may have missed....more
In this two-part Triage series, Gina Bertolini, Sarah Carlins, and Jianne McDonald analyze two recent HHS initiatives that address cybersecurity risks to hospitals and health systems nationwide. Cybersecurity events involving...more
General and specialty compliance training from the comfort of your home or office! HCCA’s Regional Healthcare Compliance Conferences provide practitioners with virtual compliance training that includes updates on the...more
Report on Patient Privacy 22, no. 6 (June, 2022) - A report from the HHS Health Sector Cybersecurity Coordination Center (HC3) found that in early 2022, ransomware groups increasingly turned to legitimate software during...more
Echoing other agencies in recent weeks, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued an alert sharing resources to address and protect institutions against the recent influx of...more
CYBERSECURITY - Tulsa, OK Refuses to Pay Ransom to Attackers - The City of Tulsa, Oklahoma, announced on May 9, 2021, that it had been hit with a ransomware attack, but the Mayor is resolute in not paying the demanded...more
Report on Patient Privacy 18, no. 1 (January 2021) - The HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) settled its 13th enforcement action in its Right of Access Initiative, first announced in 2019 to support individuals’ rights to...more
CYBERSECURITY - Q3 Coveware Report: Unsettling Update on Ransomware - We spend a lot of time reporting on ransomware because we are seeing more incidents than ever before, and our readers comment that keeping them up to...more
Report on Patient Privacy 20, no. 11 (November 2020) - In her 14-plus years of investigating and blogging about hacking and breaches, “Dissent” has been yelled at, threatened with lawsuits and accused of being a criminal....more
CYBERSECURITY - U.S. Chamber of Commerce and FICO Release Security Guidelines on Telework During COVID-19 - It is no secret that companies are experiencing an increase in security incidents following the transition...more
Health insurer Anthem, Inc. has finally reached a settlement with a coalition of 41 states plus the District of Columbia, and a separate settlement with California, to resolve state attorney general investigations of a data...more
CYBERSECURITY - OFAC Issues Advisory on Sanctions for Facilitating Ransomware Payments - On October 1, 2020, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued an advisory “to...more
Adult Streaming Site Leaves 7TB of Users’ Information Unsecured - Live adult streaming website CAM4 has reportedly not secured 7TB of users’ information, which may be able to be used for blackmail and identity theft...more
Natural Gas Compressor Facility Shut Down After Ransomware Attack - The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced this week that a ransomware attack shut down a natural gas compressor facility for two days. While in...more
Researchers at Sentinel One and Dragos have detected malicious code, called EKANS or Snake, that has been designed specifically to target industrial control systems (ICS), including those of oil refineries, manufacturing...more
Although Amazon and Google respond to reports of vulnerabilities in popular home smart assistants Alexa and Google Home, hackers continually work hard to exploit any vulnerabilities in order to listen to users’ every word to...more
According to Hiscox’s Third Cyber Readiness Report, which surveyed 5,400 firms in the U.S. and the E.U., cyber threats have “become the unavoidable cost of doing business today.” The Report notes that for the first time, “a...more
We predicted last year that hackers would become more malicious in the future, not only stealing and selling data for nefarious purposes, but actually destroying data and even systems. That reality hit email provider VFEmail...more
On October 15, 2018, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced that Anthem, Inc. will pay $16 million to settle OCR’s investigation of its potential violations of the Health...more
This week the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an investigative report that outlined cyber incidents that nine public companies had experienced, causing fraudulent losses totaling more than $100 million. The...more
We all remember Kronos—the malicious malware that was sold by Russian underground forums in 2014 for $7,000. If you bought it, you were promised updates and development of new modules. The Kronos developers recently released...more
This Halloween, the scariest monsters might not be in your closet or under your bed. They may be overseas, orchestrating intrusions into your electronic medical record. Or they may be lurking in your own workforce, carrying...more
On September 2, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights (OCR) announced a settlement with Cancer Care Group, P.C., a thirteen-physician oncology practice in Indiana related to violations of the...more