Hospital loses Britney’s, Farrah’s records
Posted on | December 17, 2008 | 2 comments
Financial institutions and big-name retailers aren’t the only major targets of cybercrooks these days.
A staggering 4.07 million health-care records have been breached so far this year — about four times the amount in 2007, according to researcher DataLoss DB.
“Hospitals keep records of patients for everything: financial, Social Security, credit, medical records,” says Reed Henry, senior vice president of marketing at security firm ArcSight, which helped collect the data.
High-profile breaches often occur through the theft of tapes containing confidential data or a nosey employee. A former employee at the UCLA Medical Center this month pleaded guilty to peddling Britney Spears and Farrah Fawcett’s medical records to the National Enquirer.
The University of Utah, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia, also reported breaches this year.
–By Jon Swartz
Comments
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Bryon its great that you and Jon are updating the blog again. Whose basement did you pull the old Farrah poster from? By the way the new Sophos security report came out today you may want to check it out. they have great info on a regular basis.
Comment by al Vonkeman — 12/17/2008 @ 6:21 pm
Det. Al,
Yes I had this poster on my dorm wall; wish I still had it. I’m familiar with Sophos’ reports, a snippet of which is cited in my Cyber Katrina post. Good stuff.
Best,
Byron
Comment by bacohido — 12/17/2008 @ 6:33 pm