Archive for the ‘Laws & Regulations’ Category

Laws & Regulations Require Security & Privacy Training & Awareness

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

I’m in the final weeks of creating some privacy breach training courses that will not only help personnel to prevent privacy breaches, but also help support compliance with the FACTA Red Flags rule, the at least 45 U.S. privacy breach notice laws, plus many other laws and regulations.
Over the past decade+ there have been a large number of laws, regulations and industry standards that have specifically stated the need for organizations to provide information security and privacy training and awareness to their personnel.

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Information Security and Privacy Education Lesson Fines And Court Penalty Judgments

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

My July issue of “IT Compliance in Realtime” has been published!
This month I continue to focus on the importance of information security and privacy training and awareness to not only improve security and privacy preservation, but also to meet a very wide range of compliance requirements. The first article in this month’s Journal is, “Information Security and Privacy Education Support Compliance.” Download the PDF of the full Journal issue for the formatted, best-looking version.
Here are the first couple of sections from that article…

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15 Actions/Penalties Brought By FTC Under GLBA + FTC Act

Monday, July 7th, 2008

The FTC has long provided a great role model for other government oversight and enforcement agencies with regard to their activities in ensuring organizations follow data protection laws and also ensure organizations actually fulfill the promises they make within their published information security and privacy policies. It is too bad most of the other government agencies are not as diligent or nearly as effective in helping to ensure organizations sufficiently protect personally identifiable information (PII).
While doing some research today I compiled a list of the actions the FTC has taken, which I thought may be useful to some of you as well…

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HIPAA Humor: Dumb Robber

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Here’s a story that gave me a bit of a chuckle, “Note leads police to robbery arrest“…

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Business Leader Primer for Effective Information Disposal

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the need for business leaders to more effectively address the secure disposal of information, particularly personally identifiable information (PII). Why? Because it seems like more and more attention is being given to security technologies to protect day-to-day business…attention is good and MUST be done…but often it seems it is at the expense of then overlooking, or perhaps shrugging off, how to securely dispose of PII, systems, applications and hardware when they are no longer needed in the business. This has led to many information security incidents and privacy breaches.
I address the reasons why business leaders must give attention to information disposal in the second article of my May issue of IT Compliance in Realtime, “Business Leader Primer for Effective Information Disposal.
Download a PDF version to get a much nicer-looking copy, the super-duper graphic I put into the article, plus the sidebar information and facts. Here is an unformatted version of the article…

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More On The HHS HIPAA Compliance Activities

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Today I communicated with Sue Marquette Poremba at SC Magazine for an article she published this afternoon, “Proliferating HIPAA complaints and medical record breaches
She had seen my blog posting from yesterday, “HIPAA Complaints And Associated Resolutions Since 2003” and asked me some follow-up questions.
Here is the full reply I sent to her, much of which she used within her article, but with some other points I want to note as well…

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HIPAA Complaints And Associated Resolutions Since 2003

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has required compliance from covered entities (CEs) since 2003. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is the Federal agency with regulatory oversight for compliance; with the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) responsible for Privacy Rule enforcement and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) responsible for Security Rule enforcement. Why two different offices to perform enforcement activities? No good reason was ever given.
I was just out looking on the HHS’s HIPAA compliance and enforcement site.
On May 12, 2008, they provided some interesting statistics from their enforcement activities from the past 5 years. Looks like they love Excel and the graphing capabilities! 🙂 I want to share some of the statistics with you…

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45 U.S. Breach Notice Laws…And Still Counting

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

Yesterday I posted a link to my quick reference list of breach notice laws.
I created that document at the beginning of this month, and Doug Markiewicz told me today in a comment to that post that there are two additional laws, one signed since I created my most recent list; thanks Doug!

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43 U.S. Breach Notice Laws…And Counting

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

There are currently 43 breach response laws in the U.S.; this includes the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

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SEC Regulation S-P Proposals To Improve The Security Of Customer Information Within Brokerage Shops

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Do you work for a brokage house, have a subsidiary that is a brokerage house, or do any type of work with a brokerage house? If so, then you should be aware of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed changes to Regulation S-P in March of this year.
In general, the proposed amendments to Regulation S-P…

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