From HealthcareITNews, more breaches happened in Q3 of 2016 than in the previous two quarters. Some 118 security incidents were either reported to the Department of Health and Human Services or first disclosed in the media in Q3 2016, compared with 89 in Q2 and 63 in Q1. Based on the types of breaches from the article, proper protections may have alleviated some of breaches or prevented them from happening in the first place.

According to the article, while the overall number of breached records is down, the number of individual breaches is up. According to the article, 41% of healthcare data breaches in September were insider incidents, seven of which were accidental and eight were insider wrongdoing. Those accidental breaches were likely the cause of opening infected files (avoid these files), falling for a support scam (support scams are on the rise, here’s how to avoid them), opening a phishing email (you need to watch out for phishing),  visiting an infected web page (block access to potentially harmful pages) with an unpatched computer (managed patching can help)

The article goes on to state that 32% of September breaches involved hacking, including ransomware and other malware. Now that ransomware is a reportable breach, it’s even more important to protect your systems with a multi-faceted approach. Our article in our previous newsletter goes over all the ways you can help protect your systems that includes:

• User Education
• Update-to-date anti-virus
• Gateway network protection.
• Email Virus Protection
• Content filtering
• Managed Patching
• Good backups and continuity plans

If you are overwhelmed, frustrated, confused or all of the above regarding HIPAA and how to make headway in your compliance efforts, give us a call. We are happy to meet with you to discuss where you are currently at and what your best next steps would be. We offer a variety of services to help out including performing security risk assessments and providing remediation solutions for common compliance issues. You don’t have to try to figure out HIPAA on your own – give us a call!