back to article Nearly 1 in 5 health data breaches take years to spot, says Verizon

Stolen medical information is a prevalent problem across multiple industries, according to a new study by Verizon. The issue is compounded because many organisations outside of the healthcare sector do not even realise they even hold this type of data. Common sources of protected health information are employee records ( …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Holmes

    Hardly surprising, given the dearth of IT knowledge in the industry... and given the hell to pay if anyone looks for the breaches and actually finds one.

    P.S. Is the telco in question still running the Medicare claims system? The one that involves accepting two invalid SSL certs in the process of starting some heinous Java VPN... which by law must be done by a Registered Nurse who barely even knows how to type. Have they fixed anything yet? I'm guessing they haven't even spotted any breaches in it yet, so they're still in ain't-broke-don't-fix mode.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I work for a health insurance company. Can an outsider break in... more than likely since no system is totally secure. However, they have been outsourcing processing of claims to a certain sub-continent. Most of us in IT have signed a letter stating that any data leakage from this will not and can not be our fault as once the data leaves our system (even via VPN) it's out of our hands. Funny.. even the CIO signed it.

    The C-Suits think that having this outsourced is a good thing. Well it's cheaper than doing it in house and thus the bottom line and their bonuses will be protected. But how hard can it be for a VPN user with access to pull all the data they want and save to a thumbdrive, etc.? Claims processers and customer service do have the most access to PI of anyone and that is probably where 99% of the weak links are. Many other health insurance companies are doing the same thing so.. yeah.. everyone will be breached at some point.

    Anonymous for obvious reasons.

    1. gnarlymarley

      The C-Suits think that having this outsourced is a good thing. Well it's cheaper than doing it in house and thus the bottom line and their bonuses will be protected.

      My company has outsourced many things and found out that outsourcing one item cost us US$7,000,000 more than when it was insourced. Might be good to watch out for the hidden costs. I suspect that most folks do not compare or even see the hidden costs before they sign the paperwork.

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