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HIPAA Breach Report for July 2018

Picture of Hoala Greevy Hoala Greevy July 15, 2018

HIPAA Breach Reports

The Paubox HIPAA Breach Report analyzes protected health information (PHI) breaches affecting 500 or more people as reported to the HHS in June 2018.

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by People Affected

Top Three Breach Types

Desktop Computer breaches ranked the highest with 279,722 people's PHI hacked or stolen in June. Desktop Computer rose two spots from last month's report, where it ranked third.
Email breaches once again ranked second with PHI of 49,666 people breached. This is the second consecutive month Email came in second in this category.
Network Server breaches came in third with 7,362 people having their PHI breached. It dropped two spots from last month, when it ranked first.

Bottom Three Breach Types

Laptop ranked as the lowest number of people's PHI being breached in June with 1,478 breaches.
Other was the second lowest type of breach as ranked by people affected with 4,919.
Electronic Medical Record was the third lowest type of breach as ranked by people affected with 5,149.

HIPAA Breaches Ranked by Occurrence

The Most Common

Email yet again took the top spot as the most common breach type in June with 9 reported breaches. This was the fourth month in a row Email took the top spot in this category.
Other and Paper/Films came in tied as the second most common breach type with 6 breaches each.
Desktop Computer and Network Server came in tied for third with 4 reported breaches each in June.

Takeaways

For the fourth consecutive month, Email ranked first for Breaches Ranked by Occurrence.

Desktop Computer HIPAA Breaches were anchored by over 276K people's PHI breached by Med Associates, Inc. In what is clearly a trend, the data clearly shows email continues to be a proven HIPAA breach point for malicious actors. An alarming takeaway is the surprising number of HIPAA email breaches occurring with customers who use Microsoft 365 for email service.

Some of June's examples include: