According to Redspin consulting, as reported in infosecurity, the number of patient record breaches has doubled last year.
Redspin cites the increasing concentration of protected health information (PHI) on unencrypted portable devices and the lack of sufficient oversight of PHI disclosed to hospital’s business associates as the main reasons for the increase.
Here at Biscom, we’re definitely seeing an uptick in demand for our secure file transfer solution from our healthcare customers - there are serious consequences, both in terms of financial liability as well as reputation that are at stake. NIH, Mass General Hospital, Children’s Hospital, Medtronic, and many more healthcare organization trust us to transmit their PHI securely. Contact us if you’re facing similar issues – we can help!
The unfortunate victims of this latest data breach of student and parent records was discovered when a mother Googled her child’s name and turned up his social security number. In all, 18,000 student records and information about 6000 parents were also exposed when strategy consulting company Public Consulting Group accidentally left this information on an unsecure server that was indexed by Google.
We just recently celebrated our 25th anniversary as an enterprise software company providing document delivery solutions globally, which include customers from 30 of the Fortune 100 companies. Thanks for the note Dialogic!
The Ha
rvard and Yale football rivalry is the second oldest continuing rivalry in college football history. “The Game” pits Harvard Crimson against Yale Bulldogs and goes back to 1875.
However, there’s another rivalry that neither Harvard or Yale cares to win – being the unfortunate victim of a data breach. In February 2008, hackers accessed about 10,000 personal records from Harvard, including 6,000 social security numbers. Just last month, Yale discovered that an FTP server was indexed by Google after a search algorithm change, resulting in the names and social security numbers of 43,000 faculty, staff, and students made publicly available for ten months.
Their recourse – credit monitoring service for a year. Doesn’t really solve the problem, but it does end up costing these universities quite a bit of money. Or, they could have invested a small fraction of the cost and penalties in technology and solutions that would have mitigated or even prevented these problems entirely. These two prominent institutions of higher learning should worry less about losing “The Game” and more about losing their data and information assets.
We’re excited to announce Biscom Delivery Server version 4.1 with two major integrations: anti-virus and PayPal.
We’ve partnered with OPSWAT and have tightly integrated their AV product Metascan, which uses three separate AV engines to scan any files transferred through BDS for threats.
We’ve also added the ability to easily add e-commerce to your file transfers. Using PayPal, BDS senders can charge recipients for any delivery. Recipients who want to download your files can pay with their credit card or PayPal account, and once that transaction is complete, are able to retrieve the files.
Here at Biscom we take ILTA very seriously. After all, its members are the driving force in the evolution of legal technology. In the past year alone, we’ve exhibited at the last ILTA conference, participated in several product briefings and hosted almost a dozen roadshows on file transfer security. Now I’m excited to announce that we’ve taken the next step: ILTA has invited us to present at its 2011 conference.
The Biscom session, part of the conference’s State of the Art Technology Demos track, is scheduled for August 23 at 1:30 p.m. and will focus on the secure and audited delivery of documents and files.
The session will discuss how to:
- Secure the document exchange process
- Replace cumbersome and often unsecured FTP sites
- Offload large email attachments
- End dependence on physical media such as CDs and thumb drives
- Meet regulatory compliance
- Collaborate in a secure environment with clients and outside counsel
- Implement advanced encryption and user authentication
- Take advantage of Biscom’s integration with popular software such as SharePoint, Outlook, iManage and Litera
This is a timely decision by ILTA. News is breaking every day on the latest data breaches. These breaches mean costly fines and even more costly long-term repercussions for law firms such as hits to business development and client relations.
So if you are at ILTA 2011, join us to explore security protocols and solutions in the Canal E room of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel at 1:30 p.m. on August 23. And if you’re a Twitter enthusiast, reference hashtag #DEMO7 during the session.
We’ll see you at ILTA! Come by our booth – #113.
We got a nice mention in Law Technology News announcing three law firms – Gilbert, von Briesen & Roper, and Jackson Lewis – who all selected BDS for their secure file transfer requirements. They are using BDS for large litigation files, confidential health and estate planning documents, and like most of our customers, will find many more areas they can leverage the security and reporting capabilities of BDS.
Linda Musthaler, a frequent contributor to NetworkWorld, wrote a nice article (and a nice mention of Biscom Delivery Server) in the IT Best Practices Alert newsletter entitled File transfer solutions take pressure off email. She brings up great points about the issues with sending large files and the inadequacies of email, FTP, and thumb drives, especially for enterprises. This mirrors our view of email concerns, but she did seem to forget that Biscom has been offering an Outlook add-in for secure file transfer since Outlook 2003!
On the heels of my last blog post about dumpster diving online storage and file sharing services, Wired posted a story on the validity of Dropbox’s claims about their data security.
I guess the bottom line is you have to really understand how applications and services handle your information, and how it may affect your own security policies and requirements, especially SaaS services.
File sharing services are under scrutiny and most of them fail miserably. Researchers were able to harvest 310,735 files in just one month using a crawler, and included photos, zip files, PDFs, and office files. InfoWorld reported the results of the study, and “what they found will raise — no, curl your eyebrows.” And the study shows that there are people all over the world who are actively dumpster diving for files on these file sharing sites.
These file sharing and collaboration sites committed several sins, including the use of sequential IDs in their URLs. This is a good lesson for those of you looking for ways to send or share your files – make sure your vendor has extensive security experience, implements a secure architecture, and actively defends against common penetration attacks. Almost anyone can offer a secure file transfer solution, but not all SFT vendors are created equal. Do your homework, weed out the wannabes, and choose wisely. Or, you can just pick Biscom Delivery Server and be done with it.
