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HIPAA Breach Report for February 2020

Rick Kuwahara February 12, 2020

HIPAA Breach Reports

The Paubox HIPAA Breach Report analyzes protected health information (PHI) breaches affecting 500 or more people as reported to the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) in January 2020.

This report will cover:

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

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by People Affected

Feb 2020 HIPAA breaches by people affected

Top Three Breach Types

Email breaches ranked first with PHI of 361,705 people breached.
Network Server breaches came in second with 56,822 people having their PHI breached.
Paper/Films breaches came in third with 15,884 people having their data breached.

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence

The Most Common

Email again took the top spot as the most common breach type in this month's report with 15 reported breaches, three more than last month.
Paper/Films came in second with 6 breaches after not having breaches last month.
Network Server placed third with 4 reported breaches.

Takeaways

Email as a threat vector in healthcare continues to rank as the most common entry point for bad actors after leading the way in 2019. The largest breach was also caused by email when PIH Health discovered employee email accounts were potentially compromised from targeted phishing attacks that resulted in 199,548 individuals being affected. Network Server also is a fairly common entry point, but other breach types vary significantly month to month. Laptop breaches ranked in first place last month for people affected with 114,466 people's PHI compromised, but this month there were no breaches caused by Laptops.