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!

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.

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.

It’s unclear whether this was malicious or unintentional. It seems to be something that was “an honest mistake.” Well, honest mistakes do not mitigate the potential for fraud. According to the article, “Hundreds of thousands of pieces of personal information have been leaked onto an un-secure file-transfer website, or FTP.” That’s a lot of information, including social security numbers, and names and addresses of sherrif’s office employees. This breach was open from April through October, and they tracked IP addresses from all over the world that have accessed this confidential information.

At the end of the article, the helpful author lists the contact information for three credit organizations’ fraud departments. Here’s to hoping the unfortunate Mesa County employees will not have to deal with this.