Cybersecurity

As the healthcare industry battled the COVID-19 pandemic, hacking incidents increased by 42 percent from 2019, a March Protenus report found.

PeakTPA, a company that manages the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly claims for Medicare and Medicaid users, began notifying 50,000 patients that their data was breached after data from two of PeakTPA's cloud servers was stolen.

Two Walworth County (Wis.) Department of Health & Human Services employees accidentally released the personal information of 907 COVID-19 vaccine registrants over the past month, according to a March 14 Lake Geneva Regional News report. 

Swiss authorities on March 12 raided the apartment of a hacker who claimed credit for breaching San Mateo, Calif.-based security camera company Verkada and accessing its live feeds of 150,000 surveillance cameras from hospitals and other companies, Bloomberg reports. 

Strong passwords are one of the first lines of defense against hackers and keeping your accounts safe.

Six-hundred clinics, hospital and healthcare organizations were attacked by 92 individual ransomware attacks, affecting 18 million patient records in 2020. The costs of these attacks are almost $21 billion, a Comparitech study found.

St. Louis-based health insurer Centene Corp. filed a lawsuit March 11 against Accellion over a recent cyberattack on the vendor's cloud data platform that exposed personal information of a Centene subsidiary insurer, Bloomberg reports. 

Premier Diagnostics, a Lehi, Utah-based diagnostic testing company, left about 52,000 patients' data exposed last month after storing the information on a publicly accessible server, according to a March 11 KSTU report. 

American Medical Collection Agency on March 11 reached a settlement with 40 states and Washington D.C., to settle a complaint following a 2019 cyberattack that exposed 21 million Americans' personal information, including Social Security numbers, diagnoses and credit card information.

ProPath, a Dallas-based laboratory testing provider, recently began notifying 39,213 patients that an unauthorized party gained access to two ProPath email accounts.