Security, privacy and compliance headlines for healthcare professionals. 

The Latest News on Security, Privacy & Compliance
Thanks for reading CynergisTek's monthly newsletter. Included is some of the latest news from us and around the industry. Monthly topics focus on emerging security issues and updates on protecting patient privacy, as well as the latest about HIPAA compliance and enforcement. Please email us if you have any questions or would like to see different topics in the next newsletter. 
Cyber Threats Compel Changes in Security

Mac McMillan recently spoke at the 87th Annual AHIMA Convention on the topic of cybersecurity issues in healthcare. This presentation dissected  how the entire threat landscape has evolved, addressed the challenges that these threats pose to the industry and noted that outsourcing security initiatives is one of the only options to ensure networks are adequately monitored. "Coming way behind in terms of incidents are cyber attacks, but they now account for 95 percent of records exposed. Healthcare cyber attacks doubled in 2013, doubled (again) in 2014 and already have quadrupled in 2015," said McMillan in Health Data Management.


Latest Enforcement: Fraud Ringleader Gets
15-Year Sentence 

On September 25th, the leader of a $24M tax and identity theft fraud ring was sentenced to 15 years in prison and received a $6M fine. The information was stolen from a military hospital, the Alabama Department of Health and others. Experts Adam Greene of Davis Wright Tremaine and David Holtzman of CynergisTek told DataBreachToday their thoughts on this recent example. Both agreed that this type of enforcement will continue to rise and we'll continue to see more arrests for similar fraudulent behavior.

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Building an Effective Compliance Program

While at the HIMSS Privacy & Security Forum in Chicago, David Holtzman talked to Healthcare IT News about some key steps healthcare providers and vendors can take to build an effective compliance program. He outlined his thoughts on if HIPAA is enough to protect patient data and provided some best practices that can help protect sensitive data.

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Did You Catch Our Phishing Webinar?

Earlier in September CynergisTek held a webinar, "Don't Get Hooked by a Phish." In this hour-long presentation, Clayton Gouard, Technical Consultant at CynergisTek and Jay Adams, Director of InfoSec at Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, provided several real examples of phishing emails that CynergisTek uses in a phishing assessment. They used the examples to teach viewers what to look for in emails to recognize that it is a phish. T o improve your knowledge of what to look for in a suspicious email, check out the video, our infographic and a case study from one healthcare organization's custom phishing assessment.

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Upcoming HIPAA Privacy & Security Workshops

CynergisTek is providing several more HIPAA Privacy and Security Workshops across the nation this fall. All of these educational workshops are free, led by an industry expert, and address some of hottest topics and biggest challenges in healthcare IT right now. Topics that will be discussed include the return of the OCR audits, recent enforcement activity and emerging cybersecurity threats. Click here for more details and to register.

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