What are the Common Causes of Security Breach?

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From time to time, one reads about security breaches as a result of a computer being stolen containing patients’ personal health information or breaches as a result of a network being hacked (as occurred recently to Sony’s online gaming community). However, as more information is stored in “the Cloud”, how secure is that data and how worried should we be about breaches?

Michael Koploy recently posted the following on his blog, “Software Advice”. HHS Data Tells the True Story of HIPAA Violations in the Cloud. In the posting, Michael states:

“At Software Advice, we speak on the phone every day with physicians who are researching electronic health records (EHR) software. We commonly hear that they’re afraid to switch to a system that puts their health records “in the cloud.” Their fear is that patient records will be out there on the Interweb, just waiting to be hacked. We’ve written about this misconception plenty and even touched on the double-standard of using web banking while eschewing cloud-based EHRs. Just a hunch, but I bet more hackers want my credit card information than my HDL/LDL ratio.

Now, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is disclosing on its website all health record security breaches that affect more than 500 people. This provides a trove of data to back up our assertions that cloud-computing is safe. Of course, it’s all relative.”

Michael has published some interesting graphs and tables summarizing the top causes of security breaches. Although Canada is somewhat different in structure, I believe the breakdown would be quite similar.

Have you or someone you know experienced a security breach? Provide your thoughts and feedback by clicking on the “Comments” link below.