According to Redspin consulting, as reported in  infosecurity, the number of patient record breaches has doubled last year.

Redspin cites the increasing concentration of protected health information (PHI) on unencrypted portable devices and the lack of sufficient oversight of PHI disclosed to hospital’s business associates as the main reasons for the increase.

Here at Biscom, we're definitely seeing an uptick in demand for our secure file transfer solution from our healthcare customers - there are serious consequences, both in terms of financial liability as well as reputation that are at stake. NIH, Mass General Hospital, Children's Hospital, Medtronic, and many more healthcare organization trust us to transmit their PHI securely. Contact us if you're facing similar issues - we can help!

The unfortunate victims of this latest data breach of student and parent records was discovered when a mother Googled her child's name and turned up his social security number. In all, 18,000 student records and information about 6000 parents were also exposed when strategy consulting company Public Consulting Group accidentally left this information on an unsecure server that was indexed by Google.

We just recently celebrated our 25th anniversary as an enterprise software company providing document delivery solutions globally, which include customers from 30 of the Fortune 100 companies. Thanks for the note Dialogic!

We got a nice mention in Law Technology News announcing three law firms - Gilbert, von Briesen & Roper, and Jackson Lewis - who all selected BDS for their secure file transfer requirements. They are using BDS for large litigation files, confidential health and estate planning documents, and like most of our customers, will find many more areas they can leverage the security and reporting capabilities of BDS.

Linda Musthaler, a frequent contributor to NetworkWorld, wrote a nice article (and a nice mention of Biscom Delivery Server) in the IT Best Practices Alert newsletter entitled File transfer solutions take pressure off email. She brings up great points about the issues with sending large files and the inadequacies of email, FTP, and thumb drives, especially for enterprises. This mirrors our view of email concerns, but she did seem to forget that Biscom has been offering an Outlook add-in for secure file transfer since Outlook 2003!

File sharing services are under scrutiny and most of them fail miserably. Researchers were able to harvest 310,735 files in just one month using a crawler, and included photos, zip files, PDFs, and office files. InfoWorld reported the results of the study, and "what they found will raise -- no, curl your eyebrows." And the study shows that there are people all over the world who are actively dumpster diving for files on these file sharing sites.

These file sharing and collaboration sites committed several sins, including the use of sequential IDs in their URLs. This is a good lesson for those of you looking for ways to send or share your files - make sure your vendor has extensive security experience, implements a secure architecture, and actively defends against common penetration attacks. Almost anyone can offer a secure file transfer solution, but not all SFT vendors are created equal. Do your homework, weed out the wannabes, and choose wisely. Or, you can just pick Biscom Delivery Server and be done with it.

Mark Haas from Massachusetts General Hospital penned an article in the April 2011 edition of the Journal of AHIMA discussing how BDS MGH AHIMA Journal article using Biscom Delivery Server.

This just in from Mesa County, Colorado: Long-term Employee Responsible for Mesa County Data Breach.

It's unclear whether this was malicious or unintentional. It seems to be something that was "an honest mistake." Well, honest mistakes do not mitigate the potential for fraud. According to the article, "Hundreds of thousands of pieces of personal information have been leaked onto an un-secure file-transfer website, or FTP." That's a lot of information, including social security numbers, and names and addresses of sherrif's office employees. This breach was open from April through October, and they tracked IP addresses from all over the world that have accessed this confidential information.

At the end of the article, the helpful author lists the contact information for three credit organizations' fraud departments. Here's to hoping the unfortunate Mesa County employees will not have to deal with this.