Covenant HealthCare has confirmed that an unauthorized individual gained access to two employees' email accounts, potentially exposing about 45,000 patients' information.

Cyberattacks increased significantly in 2020, largely driven by a jump in attempts to extort healthcare organizations and acquire information related to COVID-19, according to a recent Crowdstrike report.

Jeffrey Parker, who falsely portrayed himself as a whistleblower and framed a Georgia hospital employee of violating HIPAA, was sentenced to six months in federal prison, according to a Feb. 23 Effingham Herald report.

St. Margaret’s Health–Spring Valley (Ill.) has shut down its computer network in response to a cyberattack Feb. 21, Shaw Local News Tribune reports. 

Hospital data breaches increased nationwide in 2020, affecting around 26.4 million people in the U.S., according to a study published Feb. 19 by cloud security platform Bitglass.

Technology companies and federal organizations are increasingly collecting users' personal data, spurring calls for more regulation to protect individual privacy.  The nation's approach to this regulation must balance privacy concerns alongside the social benefits of greater access to this data, David Deming, PhD, an economist, professor and director of the Malcolm Wiener Center of Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass., wrote in a Feb. 19 editorial published in The New York Times.

Kroger confirmed Feb. 19 that some pharmacy customers may be affected by Accellion's data breach, which they employed for third-party file transfers.

Harvard Eye Associates and Alicia Surgery Center, both in Laguna Hills, Calif., recently began notifying almost 30,000 patients that their protected health information was exposed in a ransomware attack on their IT vendor. 

Rehoboth McKinley Christian Health Care Services recently suffered a cyberattack that let unauthorized actors access its computer network, according to a Feb. 18 statement from the Gallup, N.M.-based hospital.

Facebook will no longer collect unauthorized data about people's medical and other sensitive information following recommendations from a New York Department of Financial Services investigation, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Private hospitals in the U.S. can access a free ransomware protection service funded by the Center for Internet Security. 

HHS has waived some HIPAA requirements for Texas healthcare providers to assist in disaster relief after winter storms caused water and power outages across the state. 

Scammers have developed a vaccine registration site that mimics Kettering (Ohio) Health Network's COVID-19 vaccine scheduling webpage so they can procure patients' personal and banking information, the health system said Feb. 18.

Hackley Community Care in Muskegon, Mich., has notified around 2,500 patients that their personal and health information was exposed during a phishing attack on employee email accounts last September.

Lawmakers around the nation have been pushing for state-level internet privacy laws, as life continues to advance online amid the pandemic, reports The Wall Street Journal. 

The U.S. Department of Justice indicted the hackers allegedly behind the creation of WannaCry, a ransomware that hit organizations across the globe in May 2017 including the U.K.'s national healthcare system, according to a Feb. 17 DOJ news release.

Research from Google shows that hackers can quickly find security flaws in previously patched bugs. Maddie Stone, a security researcher at Google, said that bugs are often only partially fixed allowing for previously undetected flaws, known as zero-day vulnerabilities, to be exploited repeatedly, reports MIT Technology Review. 

Grand River Medical Group is notifying 34,000 patients of a recent hacking incident that allowed an unauthorized individual to access the Dubuque, Iowa-based medical group's computer systems and view their protected health information.

Grass Valley, Calif.-based Granite Wellness Centers recently began notifying patients that their protected health information may have been exposed in a January ransomware attack on the center's computer systems.

South Korea's National Intelligence Service has accused North Korea of attempting to hack into pharmaceutical giant Pfizer's systems to steal COVID-19 vaccine technology, according to a Feb. 16 BBC report.