Providence Home Services, 365,000 medical records, Car Thief
About 365,000 hospice and home health care patients in Oregon and Washington are being notified about the theft of computer backup data disks and tapes late last month that included personal information and confidential medical records…In an announcement yesterday, Providence Home Services, a division of Seattle-based Providence Health Systems, said the records and other data were on several disks and tapes stolen from the car of a Providence employee at his home. The incident was reported by the employee on Dec. 31, according to the health care system…The data on the tapes was encrypted, Walker said. The data on the disks was in a proprietary file format that was not encrypted, but “is stored in a way that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for someone to access it, then make any sense out of it,” he said.
As far as I know, there is no law requiring that the loss of encrypted data be reported. The new rules around disclosure march onwards.
(From Computerworld, via InfoSec News [http://www.infosecnews.org/].
Deja vu
Yeah, we know, but what can you do? We screwed up, we admit it.