Based on recent news stories and our experience, it appears that cybercriminals may be targeting healthcare providers with ransomware attacks. Publicly reported incidents and others of which we are aware have involved providers ranging from clinics and imaging centers to hospitals, and these entities have had to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars to gain access to their medical records, billing records or other vital computer systems – often after significant interruption of operations. On March 31, 2016, the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security issued an alert about these attacks as a result of recent attacks on businesses including healthcare facilities and hospitals worldwide.
encryption
Adding some class to Information Governance (Part 1)
By Peter Sloan on
When governing information, it works well to identify and bundle rules (for legal compliance, risk, and value), identify and bundle information (by content and context), and then attach the rule bundles to the information bundles. Classification is a great means to that end, by both framing the questions and supplying the answers. With a classification scheme, we have an upstream “if-then” (if it’s this kind of information, then it has this classification), followed by a downstream “if-then” (if it’s information with this classification, then we treat it this way). A classification scheme is simply a logical paradigm, and frankly, the simpler, the better. For day-to-day efficiency, once the rules and classifications are set, we automate as much and as broadly as possible, thereby avoiding laborious individual decisions that reinvent the wheel.