The New York Times recently published an interesting article on the rising problem of medical identity theft. When the federal government last researched the issue in 2007, more than 250,000 Americans reported that they were victims of medical identity theft. Since that last report, most experts agree the problem has undoubtedly grown, in part because of the growing use of electronic medical records built without extensive safeguards. To exacerbate the situation, cleaning up after medical ID theft can be hindered by HIPPA compliance – the regulations protect the medical information of the ID thieves as well as you.

Theoretically, as employees go on vacation during the summer months, there will be fewer demands on your IT team. Realistically, we know that’s not true and it seems like there is actually more to do. However, summer can provide the opportunity to step back and evaluate the state of your identity and authentication management infrastructure and policies. Here are five things that are easy to overlook throughout the year that you should consider doing this summer:

I was reading about the recent access management related breach at the California Water Services Company, where an auditor resigned, but illegally accessed computer systems to steal more than $9 million before leaving. While the company should be lauded for catching the fraud before the wire transfers could go through and irreparable damage could be done, it should serve as another cautionary tale in what has become a recurring theme on the application security front. This is just one more saga in an every growing litany of tales of breaches that we’ve hearing about.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently put out a draft “Guide to Enterprise Password Management” for public comment for feedback and improvement. While it gives a lesson in password management history, it doesn’t quite break new grounds on prescriptive opinion. Dave Kearns provided useful analysis of the NIST paper in his recent Managing Passwordsarticle on Network World, and a couple of nuggets of wisdom jumped out at me:

HIMSS is right around the corner. It's one of our favorite conferences of the year, as we get to see many of our healthcare customers all in one place. As I mentioned in my last post, if you're attending the conference this year, please plan to stop by our booth (#7339) and say hello, or check out the presentations by Imprivata's customers. OhioHealth and Southwest Washington Medical Center will be discussing the ‘Paperless Hospital' and ‘HIPAA Audits' respectively. With all the focus on healthcare now, what trends am I going to be looking for at HIMSS this year? Here are a few topics that our customers have shared with us:

We often hear of security getting in the way when it comes to clinicians wanting immediate access to patient data. Since it's better to hear from one's peers, Imprivata asked some of its healthcare customers for tips on implementing single sign-on and strong authentication to eliminate password management headaches and how it facilitated making it easier for clinicians to get access to the records they need. As we turn our attention to HIMSS 2009, we want to share our customers' advice, thoughts and concerns on how best to navigate through the employee access management obstacles:

We've found that the best resource for better understanding how to solve employee access management are our customers. So over the past week or so, as a few of our customers have shared details of their OneSign experiences, I thought you may want to hear what some of them are saying and doing...

The stimulus package recently signed by President Obama has been the cause for vigorous debate. One by-product of the package that has not been widely discussed is a provision that would reshape the medical industry by creating a central repository of computerized medical records for all American's. An increase in the level of electronic information of this magnitude exponentially raises the vulnerability of a security breach, which we'll focus on today.

In our last blog posting, we discussed three priorities all organizations should focus on in 2009: security, productivity and manageable IdM projects. Today we're looking more closely at enterprise security.

Happy New Year everyone. Unfortunately for all of us, we enter 2009 facing the reality of an economic recession that affects every industry. Layoffs are rampant, budgets are slashed and businesses are scrambling to weather the economic storm. Faced with these hard realities, it's a good time to regroup and rethink our next steps as we prepare for the eventual upturn.