Security Plan

Security Plan

Introduction

Security breach means an incident resulting in access of data, services, application, networks or devices of an organization to an unauthorized individual or a company by any illegal means. Security breach occurs when violations of security policies or procedures take place. Taking healthcare department in consideration, security breach for this industry is highly risky and can result in a big loss for patients and the hospitals. Violation of policies can occur within the organization and from outside of organization. The occurrence of this event can result in low risk to highly risky and critical situations where there can be high threats depending upon the data leaked, and as well depends upon how critical the information was and what maximum harm can be done.

Discussion

Record case reports reflect from the beginning of this year till now around 6,294,690 patient records have been breached in United States. This is really high number of records being breached in comparison of previous years. The compromised record contained names, Social Security numbers, bank account information, Credit card information, addresses, dates of birth, and health information. If given a thought what harm can be done with this type of classical personal information is in the hands of someone who can utilize them with negative aspect, it surely is alarming. It takes time to notice that breach has occurred, considering the stats of security breach it takes 30 days to 365 days to know violation of policies took place and other six months more to investigate the reason and then more time to rectify it (Ruseva, 2013). There are different types of security breaches which include;

Physical Security Breach

In this form of security breach, physicality is involved where intruder steals physical data or any other storage device in which data is stored. Most commonly backup tapes, laptops and computers are stolen. It is not necessary intruder is a someone who is not related with the organization, employees or visitors can be an intruder as well having a wrong intention for the organization. Again not necessary storage device is stolen anyone who has access can copy the data and transfer it by any means.

Electronic Security Breach

In this form of security breach electronic media is utilized, individuals using this media are commonly named as hackers. These hackers use weaknesses of the system to get access in the network. Weakness can be of any type, for example required network devices related to security are not installed or passwords of accessing the system are weak.

In the last 3 years there were biggest HIPAA data breaches, the biggest breach of history in united states was in which 4,901,432 individuals were affected. This breach took place at Tricare Management Activity, a health insurance carrier for the US military in 2011. Data storage backup records of 4.9 million individuals were stolen from an employee's car. Data included Social Security numbers, addresses and phone numbers, and some personal health data such as clinical notes, laboratory tests and prescriptions. This incident ended up with $ ...