Health data breaches spike

Quartz reports that almost 87 million U.S. patients had their health data compromised during the first nine months of 2023, 45 million of which had their data breached during the third quarter alone, compared with the 37 million patients who were impacted by data breaches in the entirety of 2022. Health data breaches have also totaled 480 during the first three quarters of 2023, compared with 373 during the whole of last year, with incidents at HCA Healthcare and Managed Care of North America being the largest so far this year, according to a report from Atlas VPN. Meanwhile, California was the state with the most health breaches, followed by New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, while only Vernon was not impacted by such incidents. The findings come after average data breach costs were reported by IBM to have reached $4.45 million in 2023, which was 15% higher than the past three years, with average health breach costs reaching a record-breaking $10.9 million.