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
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.
Full Data
Click here to view the raw data (Google Sheets).
About the Paubox HIPAA Breach Report
The Paubox HIPAA Breach Report analyzes breaches that affected 500 or more individuals as reported in the HHS Wall of Shame in January 2020.