Monthly Breach Deets: Respiratory Care Provider Data Breach

An in-home respiratory care provider, experienced a data breach from July 23, 2021 – July 27, 2021. The provider later indicated that unauthorized individuals had accessed their IT systems.

According to the HIPAA Journal, a total of 318,379 patients in California had been compromised. This cost them a total of $4,874,100 in operational downtime, legal action, loss of data and reputational damage, according to eRiskHub.

The data breach contained the following protected health information (PHI):

• Names
• Addresses
• Driver’s license numbers
• Birth dates
• Patient account numbers
• Medical record numbers
• Social Security numbers
• Health insurance information
• Claims information

This data breach could have been prevented with the following tips.

1. Awareness - Ensuring your employees are aware of how easily this can happen and providing them with ransomware attack training to test their awareness can help lower your risks.
2. Identifying Spam – Avoiding clicking on links or opening suspicious email attachments can save your business a lot of headaches down the road. Educating your employees on how to identify suspicious email attachments and links is a great start.
3. Updating Equipment – Keep your computers up to date with the latest updates and patches to ensure they are as secure as possible.
4. Updating Operating Systems – Keep your equipment and operating systems up to date as outdated operating systems are more vulnerable to ransomware attacks, malware and data breaches. Out of date software can provide attackers with a back door into the rest of your systems.
5. Improve General Security and Limit Access to Valuable Data – There are several ways to improve your general security including using a VPN network, multi-factor authentication, firewalls, traffic monitoring and more. With a great number of users comes increased vulnerability so restricting access to valuable data by providing it to only those who really need to access it helps. You can set up different user roles with varying levels of access to your internal systems depending on what their job entails.

VGM Forbin can help you protect your business against these threats. Our team of IT experts will assess your systems and make recommendations to help you stand strong against cyber-attacks. Call us at (877) 659-5241 or complete the form to get a free consultation.