'Wall of Shame' Exposes 21M Medical Record Breaches

Lucas123 writes "Over the past three years, about 21 million patients have had their unencrypted medical records exposed in data security breaches that were big enough to require they be reported to the federal government. Each of the 477 breaches that were reported to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) involved 500 or more patients, which the government posts on what the industry calls 'The Wall of Shame.' About 55,000 other breach reports involving fewer than 500 records where also reported to the OCR. Among the largest breaches reported was TRICARE Management Activity, the Department of Defense's health care program, which reported 4.9 million records lost when backup tapes went missing. Another five breaches involved 1 million or more records each. Yet, only two of the organizations involved in the breaches have been fined by the federal government."

Comments

Punish them.

[Nyder]

Unless the various companies that lose the data are punished, nothing will change.

Re:Punish them.

[Anonymous Coward]

With their wallets?

Wasn't there an article recently on Slashdot about how the IRS is likely to pay $21 billion dollars over the next 5 years because of identity theft?

Re:Punish them.

[vux984]

In this case, what you suggested amounts to "government should punish itself" - something not very common for the US govt, wouldn't you say?

Nor terribly productive.

At best, they increase their budget by the amount of the fines, and then raise taxes to cover the increased budget.

At worst, they pay the fine without increasing their budget, and make cuts elsewhere... thereby ensuring that not only is there no money to improve the security that led to the first breach, but now they are probably running shorthanded increasing the odds of a second breach...

Punishing governement and large corporations is generally meaningless. We have to pierce the veil and go after individuals within them... fine or even imprison them personally.

Re:Punish them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Criminal charges against the CEO, CIO and CSO level. Or at least civil charges.

I'm currently working on a project with a major regional medical HMO. What I've found in 3 months of digging makes me want to *never* have a friend or family go to any of their affiliates. There is zero recognition of privacy -- admins are routinely passing round medical records of celebrities. Their idea of 2 factor authentication was forcing someone to login with the same credentials twice in a row. What appears to be security (doctors, nurses using RFID badges to login and out) is theatre only -- only a single ID is associated with all RFID badges for logins. A complete farce.

Why? Because even when caught there is no penalty. Make the penalty meaningful to the people running things, and you'll see cultural changes pretty damn fast.

Re:Punish them.

[Eskarel]

Hospitals are complex places. Lots of staff, lots of data being transferred between systems some of which are insecure and there's nothing you can do about that, because they're required, and no competitors exist.

The main reason that the number of breaches in hospitals is as low as it is is because for the most part people don't target hospitals so relatively basic security functions. Now of course we have people doing it "for the lulz" or to prove some sort of point which makes health care even harder to do.

In a hospital environment you have to cater for doctors which no one other than the person running their accreditation even knows exist, nurses who view IT as a barrier between them and what they actually do, patients who want miracles, and health funds who seem to desire complexity for the sake of complexity. Connect all that up to IT products which haven't been updated since the mid 90's, never will be updated and can't be replaced because the group that would certify a competitor makes the product in question, add in vastly disparate WAN locations, a need for instant performance and 5 nines up time all on a shoestring budget and you'll start to get a picture of hospital IT.

In the end you really have to ask yourself, is it better or worse to risk having a portion of your medical record stolen, or to die because the doctors couldn't get the information they needed quick enough. Sadly that's about how the choices line up, hospitals aren't generally negligent, it's just the nature of the game.

Re:Punish them.

[rgbrenner]

Punishing companies is punishing their customers

Bullshit. I'm tired of this line.

When a company is punished, it raises the cost for them to do business, resulting in price increases for customers.

For some reason, you stop there. But it doesn't end there.

The customers, who can chose where to spend their money, will go to the cheapest retailer... leaving the punished company with fewer customers, less market share, etc.

Customers are not forced to buy from a company.. so fining 1 company is NOT punishing customers.

Where do I apply for the "HDD encryptor" position?

[c0lo]

TFA (second page):

On March 9, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee (BCBS) was fined the maximum $1.5 million for 57 unencrypted computer hard drives that were stolen from a leased storage facility in 2009. BCBS has since encrypted all of its hard drives, representing 885TB of data.
BCBS said it spent more than 5,000 man-hours on the encryption effort, which cost the company $6 million.

Say they used new HHD-s at $100 for a 1TB HDD -> HDD cost=$88,500. F*** it... let's be generous and say all the equipment amounts for $1M.
The rest should be labour-cost, isn't it? Which means $1000/h... Seems to be a good trade to be in.

Re:Where do I apply for the "HDD encryptor" positi

[ColdWetDog]

No, No, No - you have it all wrong.

Say $100K for the drives, another 50K for the 'Enterprise Level' software, another 100K for labor.

The other 5.5 million for upper level executive compensation.

Thinking this stuff through is hard.

Our secret health

[mcelrath]

And why do we care who has our medical information?

Because in the US, we've decided that the only people that get health care are those with jobs. So getting a job is deeply tied to one's state of health. Accidental leaking of your health care information could lead to losing your job, or failure to obtain one. Other laws try to tackle that, but nonetheless, we all have the fear that if our potential employer (especially) knew how much we might really cost, we wouldn't get that job. And the fact of the matter is that no employer wants to employ a sick person if they can help it.

We'd be better off decoupling health care from employment. One side effect would be that medical information wouldn't be so secret. This is rather important when you consider that that information should perhaps be shared among health care providers, patients with the same ailments, and especially, family (possibly distantly related but genetically susceptable, for instance).

Re:Our secret health

[brit74]

And why do we care who has our medical information?

I think people are concerned about the privacy implications. If you have a talk with your doctor about something personal, you'd like to believe that the entire world isn't listening in. What's that? You've got erectile disfunction? You've had mental health issues? You once tried to kill yourself? You went to the emergency room because you were high on drugs or you stuck an object where it shouldn't go? You've admitted to having lots of sex partners or you're gay and you haven't come out? You've got an STD and you'd prefer that your friends and family don't know about it?

Not only are there some potentially embarrassing secrets, but the idea that everyone can find out about your medical history can make you less likely to go to the doctor -- because there might be situations where it might be embarrassing to tell a doctor what the situation is, and much more embarrassing if the whole world could find out about it.

Re:Where do I apply for the "HDD encryptor" positi

[c0lo]

It usually takes three people to give me three different wrong answers.

That's grossly inefficient... in some of the places I worked, I only needed a single person (my manager) to get 3 different wrong answers.

Should have looked further

[jforr]

"Among the largest breaches reported was TRICARE Management Activity, the Department of Defense's health care program, which reported 4.9 million records lost when backup tapes went missing."

Submitter should have dug a little bit further. TRICARE was the agency where the records originated, but SAIC was the "business associate" that actually lost the records belonging to TRICARE.

I beat the system

[slashmydots]

I beat the system by having no significant medical records in the last 10 years :P One finger X-ray (no break, yay) and like 2 appointments for allergies. Good luck blackmailing me with that, lol. I just stay exceptionally healthy. Take that, hackers! lol.

Re:I beat the system

[TheRealMindChild]

I go the other route. I have so much debt in medical bills that only a fool would try to steal my identity

But server was hacked....

[stanlyb]

If you read the article, you will see that the main problem is of proper handling of the backups, not the actual server application or database, or with other words, here the problem is the "meatware", not the "software"