Tracking Common Causes of Recent Health Data Breaches

These incidents, which include ransomware and phishing attacks - as well as misconfigured IT - are the culprits in nearly two-thirds of the 81 major health data breaches that have been added to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services HIPAA Breach Reporting Tool website so far this year.

Those 51 hacking/IT incidents affected nearly 2.8 million individuals, or more than 90 percent of the 3 million individuals affected by breaches added to the tally so far in 2019.

Commonly called the wall of shame, the HHS website lists health data breaches affecting 500 or more individuals that have been reported to federal authorities.

A snapshot on Monday shows that 2,667 major health data breaches affecting nearly 193.9 individuals have been posted to the HHS website since 2009.