Cyber Breach Insurance May Be Useless If You’re Negligent

Ideally, your healthcare organization will never see a major data breach. But realistically, given how valuable healthcare data is these days — and the extent to which many healthcare firms neglect data security — it’s safer to assume that you will have to cope with a breach at some point.

In fact, it might be wise to assume that some form of costly breach is inevitable. After all, as one infographic points out, 55 healthcare organizations reported network attacks resulting in data breaches last year, which resulted in 111,809,322 individuals’ health record information being compromised. (If you haven’t done the math in your head, that’s a staggering 35% of the US population.)

The capper: if things don’t get better, the US healthcare industry stands to lose $305 billion in cumulative lifetime patient revenue due to cyberattacks likely to take place over the next five years.

So, by all means, protect yourself by any means available. However, as a recent legal battle suggests, simply buying cyber security insurance isn’t a one-step solution. In fact, your policy may not be worth much if you don’t do your due diligence when it comes to network and Internet security.

The lawsuit, Columbia Casualty Company v. Cottage Health System, shows what happens when a healthcare organization (allegedly) relies on its cyber insurance policy to protect it against breach costs rather than working hard to prevent such slips.

Back in December 2013, the three-hospital Cottage Health System notified 32,755 of its patients that their PHI had been compromised. The breach occurred when the health system and one of its vendors, InSync, stored unencrypted medical records on an Internet accessible system.

It later came out that the breach was probably caused by careless FTP settings on both systems servers which permitted anonymous user access, essentially opening up access to patient health records to anyone who could use Google. (Wow. If true that’s really embarrassing. I doubt a sharp 13-year-old script kiddie would make that mistake.)

Anyway, a group of presumably ticked off patients filed a class action suit against Cottage asking for $4.125 million. At first, cyber breach insurer Columbia Casualty paid out the $4.125 million and settled the case. Now, however, the insurer is suing Cottage, asking the health system to pay it back for the money it paid out to the class action members. It argues that Cottage was negligent due to:

  • a failure to continuously implement the procedures and risk controls identified in the application, including, but not limited to, its failure to replace factory default settings and its failure to ensure that its information security systems were securely configured; and
  • a failure to regularly check and maintain security patches on its systems, its failure to regularly re-assess its information security exposure and enhance risk controls, its failure to have a system in place to detect unauthorized access or attempts to access sensitive information stored on its servers and its failure to control and track all changes to its network to ensure it remains secure.

Not only that, Columbia Casualty asserts, Cottage lied about following a minimum set of security practices known as a “Risk Control Self Assessment” required as part of the cyber insurance application.

Now, if the cyber insurer’s allegations are true, Cottage’s behavior may have been particularly egregious. And no one has proven anything yet, as the case is still in the early stages, but this dispute should still stand as a warning to all healthcare organizations. If you neglect security, then try to get an insurance company to cover your behind when breaches occur, you might be out of luck.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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