Covered entities must notify affected individuals following the discovery of a breach of unsecured protected health information. Covered entities must provide this individual notice in written form by first-class mail, or alternatively, by e-mail if the affected individual has agreed to receive such notices electronically. If the covered entity has insufficient or out-of-date contact information for 10 or more individuals, the covered entity must provide substitute individual notice by either posting the notice on the home page of its web site for at least 90 days or by providing the notice in major print or broadcast media where the affected individuals likely reside. The covered entity must include a toll-free phone number that remains active for at least 90 days where individuals can learn if their information was involved in the breach. If the covered entity has insufficient or out-of-date contact information for fewer than 10 individuals, the covered entity may provide substitute notice by an alternative form of written notice, by telephone, or other means.
How Many More Breaches And Where
In addition to notifying affected individuals and the media (where appropriate), covered entities must notify the Secretary of breaches of unsecured protected health information. Covered entities will notify the Secretary by visiting the HHS web site and filling out and electronically submitting a breach report form. If a breach affects 500 or more individuals, covered entities must notify the Secretary without unreasonable delay and in no case later than 60 days following a breach. If, however, a breach affects fewer than 500 individuals, the covered entity may notify the Secretary of such breaches on an annual basis. Reports of breaches affecting fewer than 500 individuals are due to the Secretary no later than 60 days after the end of the calendar year in which the breaches are discovered.
There are many factors to consider when preparing for and managing a data breach, such as the amount of time it takes to respond to a data breach and the reputational impact it has on your company. Read below to see how breaches happen, view average response times and learn other crucial information.
Although data breaches seem more prevalent nowadays because of cloud computing and increased digital storage, they have existed as long as companies have maintained confidential information and private records. However, publicly-disclosed data breaches increased in frequency in the 1980s, and awareness of data breaches grew in the early 2000s.
Most public information on data breaches only dates back to 2005. In 2020, multiple surveys showed that more than half of Americans were concerned about data breaches during natural disasters, as well as personal safety resulting from the pandemic. Data breaches today tend to impact millions of consumers in just one companywide attack.
A: The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse keeps a chronology of data and public security breaches dating back to 2005. The actual number of data breaches is not known. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse estimated that there have been 9,044 public breaches since 2005, however more can be presumed since the organization does not report on breaches where the number of compromised records is unknown.
As reported by many practitioners, from 2005 to 2019, the total number of individuals affected by healthcare data breaches was 249.09 million. Out of these, 157.40 million individuals were affected in the last five years alone [6]. In the year 2018, the number of data breaches reported was 2216 from 65 countries. Out of these, the healthcare industry faced 536 breaches. This implies that the healthcare industry has faced the highest number of breaches among all industries [7]. There were 2013 data breaches reported from 86 countries in the year 2019 [8]. The total number of healthcare records that were exposed, stolen, or illegally disclosed in the year 2019 was 41.2 million in 505 healthcare data breaches [8]. According to an IBM report, the average cost of a data breach in 2019 was $3.92 million, while a healthcare industry breach typically costs $6.45 million [9]. This cost was the highest in the USA compared to other countries. Usually, a data breach would fetch $8.19 million. However, the average cost of a healthcare data breach (average breach size 25,575 records) in the USA is $15 million [10]. The average cost of a data breach increased by 12% from 2014 to 2019, and the average cost of a breached record increased 3.4% in the same time period. Moreover, the cost of a breached record in the healthcare sector registered an increase of 19.4%, the highest in this time period [10,11,12,13].
The aforementioned facts and figures show that the data assets of individuals and organizations are at risk. Even more alarmingly, the healthcare industry in particular is being targeted by attackers, and is therefore the most vulnerable. Thus, data privacy and confidentiality has become a serious concern for both individuals and organizations. Healthcare data are more sensitive than other types of data because any data tampering can lead to faulty treatment, with fatal and irreversible losses to patients. Hence, healthcare data need enhanced security, and should be breach-proof. In this study, our main concern was to investigate the healthcare data breaches reported or published by different eminent and authentic sources. We aimed to examine the causes of these breaches and use the results to improve healthcare data confidentiality. The analyzed factors that lead to healthcare data breaches will be addressed in our future research work to improve healthcare data confidentiality.
PRC Database: PRC is a US based, non-profit organization established by Beth Givens in 1992. Its main purpose is to protect consumer information, to provide consumer advocacy services and guidelines to control personal information, and to improve consumer awareness about the technological effects of personal privacy. It provides a complete database of data breaches. The database has a record of 9016 data breach instances reported by different organizations. According to the PRC database, more than 10 billion user records have been compromised since 2005.
The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC), a nonprofit organization based in the USA, reported that there were 9016 data breach instances in different sectors from January 2005 to October 2019. The total number of records exposed in these breaches was more than 10 billion (10,376,741,867) [6]. The different types of attacks used to breach the information were Intentional Insider Attacks (INSD), Frauds Using Cards (CARD), Physical Damage such as the theft or loss of paper documents (PHYS), Damage of Portable Device such as lost or theft (PORT), Hacking or Malicious Attacks (HACK), Stationary Computer Loss (STAT), Unknown Approaches (UNKN), and Unintentional Disclosure (DISC). The organizations that were affected by these data breaches may be classified into the following categories:
In the second case, from 2015 to 2019, there were a total of 2027 data breach incidents faced among the specified sectors. Out of these 2079 incidents, 1587 were recorded in the healthcare (MED) sector, which is 76.59% of the total. The MED sector is followed by the BSF sector, with a share of 9.36%. However, the other sectors show a small decrease in incidents. The data clearly shows that the healthcare industry has become the main victim of data breaches. Moreover, the rate of healthcare data breaches has increased even more rapidly in the last five years.
In Table 6, eight locations, i.e., Electronic Medical Records (EMR), Laptop, Desktop computers, Other Portable electronic devices, Paper documents, Network Server, Email, and Other, are the locations from where the protected health information (PHI) was breached. According to the analysis, out of the 8 locations, Paper/Film is the most susceptible to breaches. It saw 575 breached incidents out of a total of 3253 incidents, accounting for 17.67% of the total number of episodes during 2010 to 2019. The leading position of Paper/Films is because of the improper disposal of unnecessary but sensitive healthcare data. Paper/Films is followed by Email, which represented 17.52%, and Network servers, which accounted for16.69% of the total.
where Ft+1 is the forecast value at time t + 1, α is the smoothing constant, yt is a known value at time t, and Ft is the forecast value of the variable Y at the time t [29]. Here, we take the value of α = 0.4 so as to accomplish a balanced influence of observations on the forecasting results. Table 9 provides the forecast results of healthcare data breaches and their cost, determined using the SES method. The forecast values were calculated on the basis of actual (known observations) values using Equation (2). Later, we compared the results with those generated by the data analysis tool in MS-Excel to verify the accuracy. The final results of the forecasting are presented in Table 9.
The findings from the report showed that the overall increase in average total cost was due to slower response time as a result of remote working. Organizations with more than 50% of their workforce working remotely took nearly 316 days to locate and contain the breach, compared to the regular average of 287 days. As per the report, data breaches with longer response time (more than 200 days) cost $4.87 million on average while for breaches with less than 200 days response time cost $3.61 million on average. The report also indicated that businesses could save up to 30% if they could contain a breach within 200 days.
In 2005 alone, 136 data breaches were reported by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. More than 4,500 data breaches have been made public since 2005, with more than 816 million individual records breached. Because the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse reports on breaches for which the number of records breached is unknown and is not a comprehensive compilation of all breach data, the actual total records breached as a result of data breaches is likely substantially higher. For instance, the 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report covered over 2,100 data breaches in which more than 700 million records were exposed for the year 2014 alone. 2ff7e9595c
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