With Eyes Wide Open: How to Manage Vendor Compliance Liability

manage vendor compliance liability

Ever feel like your efforts to avoid compliance liability just turned into a game of hot potato? Is it a vendor responsibility (business associate or other third party) or yours? Consider cloud service providers (CSPs) as an example. Maintaining HIPAA compliance brings unique challenges to anyone working in or with the cloud. Don’t assume your … Read more

Minimize Risk: Healthcare’s Need to Address the Unknown Unknowns

risk management

Government agencies – state and federal – have spent the past several months trying to get healthcare’s attention about cybersecurity and simple steps that organizations can take to reduce their risk of ransomware (aka minimize risk). “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that … Read more

Telework & Telehealth: How Can We Work Securely During a Pandemic?

how to telework telehealth securely

Remember that brief moment when we thought the COVID-19 business impact was lifting? It was a nice thought, but we were wrong. We’re firmly in the midst of the pandemic with alleviation an ever-moving target. What does this mean for businesses, especially covered entities (CE) and business associates (BA)? Telework and telehealth present security risks, … Read more

Video Hijacking Have You Worried? Try these 5 Steps from the FBI

video hijacking fbi advice apgar

The healthcare industry reports that video hijacking, or teleconference hijacking, emergence on the rise as telehealth appointments replace typical in-person ones during the COVID-19 crisis. The FBI has received multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic images, hate images and threatening language. Yet another reason that, even though OCR has indicated it will not … Read more

Teleworking Safely: Precautions for Working Remotely during COVID-19

COVID-19 Teleworking Safety Tips

As we cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s important to take a few extra measures to protect your organization, your patients and clients, and your data. Teleworking, where more and more individuals are working remotely, is widely accepted to prevent further spread of the virus. Now is a good time to address the risks that … Read more

What does the CCPA have to do with Policies & Procedures?

policies procedures CCPA

Compliance with CCPA is entwined with how you do business. Your business operations (the “how and what”) directly link to company policy, controls, processes: policies and procedures. You could say that the CCPA has everything to do with policies and procedures. Which is why you need to update yours – yesterday. Not convinced? Let’s go … Read more

Perimeter Security: It’s the Simple Things That’ll Get You

perimeter security

Are you sure your medical records aren’t accessible by outsiders? Maybe check your perimeter security. I’m not talking about fancy technical security gadgets, but the simple, obvious things like setting a password on your internet-facing applications. Here’s why I ask. Did you hear about the 187 medical system servers not protected by passwords or necessary … Read more

RFI Vulnerability Lesson: Beware of Who You (try to) Hack

Beware of Who You Hack

Isn’t it rewarding when a fellow security professional posts about an attempted hack of his personal website that he turned into a lesson in website security? And in the end, hacked the hacker? That’s exactly what happened with Larry Cashdollar, a senior security response engineer at Akamai. Cashdollar noticed something peculiar in the logs on … Read more

How can your Third Party Vendor help or hurt your SOC 2 status?

Are you tracking the moving target of your third party vendors’ privacy and security practices? You may want to get on that. If you’re one of the many organizations about to tackle the SOC 2 assessment process, familiarize yourself with the AICPA’s 2017 Trust Service Criteria document (formerly Trust Service Principles). You’ll quickly notice the … Read more

Business Continuity Plans: Keep Calm and Carry On with Impact Mitigation

When the much threatened 9.0 quake hits the Pacific Northwest, your first reaction should be, “OMG, we’ve just had a mega-quake. I want to make sure that my family and friends are safe.“ That’s cool. BUT – if cables and power lines get cut accidentally, you want to make sure that your reaction is not … Read more