HIPAA Breach Report for May 2020

• HIPAA Breaches Ranked by People Affected
• HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence
• Takeaways
• Full Data

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by People Affected

Top Three Breach Types

• Email breaches ranked first by a big margin with 285,327 people's protected health information (PHI) being affected.
• Electronic Medical Record breaches came in second with 74,122 people having their PHI breached.
• Network Server breaches came in third with 59,467 people having their PHI breached.

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence

The Most Common

• Email took the top spot again as the most common breach type in this month's report with 16 reported breaches.
• Paper/Films came in second with 8 breaches.
• Network Server placed third with 4 reported breaches.

Takeaways

Email as a hacking threat in healthcare continues to rank as the most common breach type with 16 reported breaches in April. The number of reported breaches remained about the same from the previous month, with 33 total incidents, compared to 34 the month prior. Although the number of breaches remained the same in April, the severity increased as the number of people affected increased to 440,435 as compared to 390,161 in March. The largest breach was caused by a phishing attack on Beaumont Health that affected 114k patients. Hackers gained access to several Beaumont Health employee email accounts for a week in 2019.

Full Data

Click here to view the raw data (Google Sheets).

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