id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ihlr-22883	McLarren, Connor	Once More Unto the Breach: How the Growing Threat of Ransomware Affects HIPAA Compliance for Covered Entities	2018	26	.pdf	application/pdf	10850	460	47	The U.S. Federal Government’s Response to the Growing Threat of HIPAA Data Breaches After months of major ransomware attacks across the country, Congress pushed to get HHS to recognize ransomware attacks as breaches.67 Representatives Ted Lieu (D, Cal.) and Will Hurd (R, Tex.) sent a letter to the OCR requesting that it recognize ransomware attacks as some sort of breach.68 In this letter, both congressmen acknowledged the unusual nature of the threat ransomware poses, wherein ransomware is largely a problem towards patient safety rather than privacy, but requested clarification and guidance from the HHS.69 Finally, in the summer of 2016, HHS released a fact sheet for the healthcare industry that outlined how it views ransomware attacks.70 After the user’s data is encrypted, the ransomware directs the user to pay the ransom to the hacker (usually in a cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin) in order to receive a decryption key.5 The healthcare industry is now the most common target of ransomware attacks; reports suggest that hospitals were on the receiving end of 88% of all ransomware attacks.6 While ransomware attacks are devastating to hospitals, they have also created a legal quandary: while the malware locks hospitals out of their access to patient health records, determining whether or not that data has actually been breached and accessed by a third-party can be difficult to determine and depends on the variant of ransomware used in the attack.7	cache/ihlr-22883.pdf	txt/ihlr-22883.txt