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Health Insurance Portability And Accountability Act

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Purpose Statement

The creation go of the Internet has helped spawn new forms of criminals and crimes, and has always helped make older criminal schemes easier to execute, identity theft, child pornography, copyright violations, hacking and you could go on and on. In a 2003 survey conducted by the CSI with the participation of the San Francisco Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Computer Intrusion Squad, of the 530 respondents made up of U.S. corporations, government agencies, financial institutions, medical institutions and universities, 56% reported unauthorized use of their computer systems (2003 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and Security Survey).
Laws have always and will always be behind criminal acts, and new laws are put in place to tackle …show more content…

(http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/hipaa/understanding/srsummary.html)
The health industry has become the most attractive targets for cyber criminals, because of the large volumes of protected health, personals, and financial data that are retained. Therefore, it is no surprise that they have become such a popular target among cyber criminal organizations. Cybercriminals utilizes various methods to obtain the information they are seeking from both medical insurance and health industry corporations.
These methods include:
• Insider threats stealing patient records and other sensitive information while working for a company that maintains these types of records.
• Using old criminal tactics such as bribing or threatening physical harm to employee with access to records.
• Hackers breaking into record data bases, utilizing malware to steal email, dumpster diving, and skimming data from various storage devices.
• Social engineering techniques, such as posing as a legitimate employee, or business to request certain data.
The greatest threat to the health industry when it comes to loss of patient data is the insider threat, a current or former employee who has access to sensitive information, and a reason to utilize this privileged access for criminal intent. In April 2002, Christopher Scott Sandusky pled guilty to

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