Children’s Medical Clinics of East Texas Week 11

For ten weeks there has been data breaches ranging from physical to malware to cyber. For week 11 this breach happens from inside the company. Patient’s information was breached at Children’s Medical Clinics of East Texas when an employee took unauthorized screenshots of patient records (McGee, 2015).Not only do businesses have to worry about outsider threats they have to worry about insider threats as well.

A former employee took screenshots that were not authorized and sent them to a dissatisfied employee. The employee also took home business documents and did not return them (McGee, 2015).Children’s Medical Clinics of East Texas is not sure what patients records were exposed. This breach could affect over 16,000 patients at the clinic. Children’s Medical Clinics of East Texas is providing free credit monitoring to patients that ask for the service. Children’s Medical Clinics of East Texas is conducting a strict internal audit and may possibly upgrade security systems with guidance from Health and Human services (McGee, 2015).

Insider threats are just as risky as outsider threats. Companies need to review how information is transferred between businesses and how their employees handle information as well. If users need to transfer documents the business needs to be able to track the information. That also goes for USB access and file sharing websites. Screenshots are useful for help desk technicians to solve problems and it would be hard to block those altogether if they are used for other business functions.  The best thing a business can do is to mitigate risk of information being taken.

References

McGee, M. (2015, November 11). Clinic Breach Involved Authorized User. Retrieved November 17, 2015, from http://www.databreachtoday.com/clinic-breach-involved-authorized-user-a-8677