Tag: IT Assessment

Compliance

Vendor Management Lessons from Aetna’s $20 Million Lawsuit

You likely use third-party vendors to outsource your payroll, HR or IT infrastructure — all essential business functions. Unfortunately, in doing so, you’re giving multiple companies access to sensitive data, including private patient or customer information. In the event of a breach or leak of said sensitive information, it’s important to know where the chips fall and what liability you’re assuming when you outsource business efforts. Let’s take a look at how outsourcing significantly impacted the health insurer Aetna to assess opportunities and risks involved with hiring a third-party vendor. Aetna’s settlement If you’re unfamiliar with the backstory, Aetna made news for paying about $20 million in legal settlements from a case in 2017 concerning privacy violations of about 12,000

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800-53

NEW GUIDANCE RELEASED BY NIST REDEFINES ASSURANCE & TRUSTWORTHINESS FOR FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

On April 30th, 2013 the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued their latest version of essential guidance: Special Publication 800-53, Revision 4: Security and Privacy Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations.  Led by Ron Ross, a NIST fellow and the project leader, a team of computer scientists spent the past two years developing this latest 457 page revision. One of the Essential Themes of the New Guidance Mr. Ross indicated that a key theme in the new guidance is the “reintroduction of the notion of assurance, or trustworthiness of information systems.”  The bottom line is that organizations will now be under higher scrutiny in terms of how effective they are at identifying vulnerabilities and security weaknesses in systems, which

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