Federal

Attorney General James Reaches Agreement with Marymount Manhattan College to Invest $3.5 Million to Protect Students’ Online Data

NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced an agreement with Marymount Manhattan College (MMC), a private non-profit liberal arts college in New York City, to invest $3.5 million in data security to protect students’ online data. In 2021, MMC suffered a data breach that affected nearly 100,000 New Yorkers who were...

DHS Pushes for Common Cyber Incident Reporting Definitions

Jose Rascon reports: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released a new report looking to wrangle the different avenues in which the Federal government and its agencies report cyber incidents in a more ‘reportable’ fashion. The report, titled “Harmonization of Cyber Incident Reporting to the Federal Government” and released on Sept. 19, comes...

OCR Presents: How the Security Rule Can Help Defend Against Cyber-Attacks

The HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will be producing a pre-recorded webinar for HIPAA covered entities and business associates (collectively, “regulated entities”) discussing how the Security Rule can help regulated entities defend against cyber-attacks. The webinar will discuss real world cyber-attack trends from OCR breach reports and investigations and explore how implementation of...

IOCTA spotlight report on malware-based cyber-attacks published

Following the Internet Organised Crime Assessment (IOCTA) 2023, today Europol published the spotlight report “Cyber Attacks: The Apex of Crime-as-a-Service”. It examines developments in cyber-attacks, discussing new methodologies and threats as observed by Europol’s operational analysts. The report also outlines the types of criminal structures that are behind cyber-attacks, and how these increasingly professionalised groups are...

HHS Office for Civil Rights Settles with L.A. Care Health Plan Over Potential HIPAA Security Rule Violations

LA Care, the largest publicly operated health plan in the country paid $1,300,000 to settle Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced a settlement of potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Rules with LA Care, the nation’s largest publicly operated health plan...

An inexcusable gap from breach to notification, or an excusable one?

Some state and federal laws provide specific timeframes by which breached entities must provide notice to regulators and to those affected by a data breach. Unfortunately, loopholes abound, as we seen in statutory language such as Minnesota’s breach notification law, where for timing of notification, it says: “The disclosure must be made in the...

HHS Security Risk Assessment Tool Version 3.4 and Webinars

From HHS OCR: The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are hosting two webinars for the release of version 3.4 of the Security Risk Assessment (SRA) Tool. This tool is designed to aid...

SEC Cybersecurity Rule Leans on Materiality and Reasonableness

Rachel V. Rose, Ted Dziekanowski, and Andy Watkin-Child report: The US Securities and Exchange Commission released its final rule, effective Sept. 5, 2023, on cybersecurity risk management, strategy, governance, and incident disclosure. Investors, registrants, and other market participants should take special notice of two key terms in the regulations: “materiality” and the “reasonable investor.” The...