Treating Healthcare’s Insider Threat
According to reports from last week coming out of DataBreaches.net, Phoenixville Hospital in Pennsylvania and Cheyenne Regional Medical Center in Wyoming both experienced incidents of employees accessing patient data that they were unauthorized to view.
In their reports, the insiders viewed data elements including: name, address, date of birth, date of encounter, diagnoses, vital signs, medications, test results, and provider notes. In a few instances, a partial Social Security number (last 4 digits), and medical insurance company name and identification numbers.
Election Officials Fear Copycat Attacks as ‘Insider Threats’ Loom
Election officials are confronting a wave of threats and security challenges coming from a troubling source: inside the election system itself.
In interviews on the sidelines of the National Association of Secretaries of State’s summer conference, a dozen chief election administrators detailed a growing number of “insider threats” leading to attempted or successful election security breaches aided by local officials. The most prominent was in Colorado, where a county clerk was indicted for her role in facilitating unauthorized access to voting machines. But there have been similar instances elsewhere, including in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio.
Don’t Lose Your Business: Protect Your Trade Secrets
A trade secret is a piece of information that is kept secret by its owner and derives independent economic value from its secrecy. Trade secrets include a wide array of information, with individual parts of information not publicly known. For example, the formula for Coca-Cola is a trade secret, with very few employees aware of the recipe.
Common types of trade secrets include technical information, like manufacturing guides, designs or digital diagrams, or commercial information, like marketing or advertising plans. They provide businesses with a competitive edge. Protecting and securing these trade secrets to avoid financial loss is paramount in keeping your competitive edge intact.
Trade Secrets: Proper and Improper Means of Acquisition
The proper means/improper means dichotomy is at the core of every trade secret misappropriation lawsuit. The plaintiff must establish the wrongful acquisition, disclosure or use of the trade secret by improper means, and the defendant has the burden to establish the acquisition, disclosure or use of the alleged trade secret by proper means.
Growing Consensus that Trade Secret Claims Must Be Pleaded with Particularity in New York and Elsewhere
Under conventional pleading standards, courts generally allowed plaintiffs to describe their trade secrets with a level of generality when filing a complaint in a trade secret case. It often sufficed for plaintiffs to provide a rough description of the allegedly protected secrets along with allegations that the material was held as a secret and possessed “independent economic value” by virtue of being secret. This enabled plaintiffs to shield their trade secrets from the public and gave plaintiffs some flexibility in developing the trade secrets case as the litigation progressed.
Can you keep a (trade) secret?
Do you know what your trade secrets are worth? If not, it’s time to find out, because those who cannot answer this question may find themselves without a basis for bringing a claim under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA).
For example, in ATS Group, LLC v. Legacy Tank and Industrial Services LLC, 407 F. Supp. 3d 1186 (W.D. Okla. 2019), the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma considered the sufficiency of a claim brought under the DTSA. Although the plaintiff was able to identify the general contents of its allegedly stolen trade secrets and the methods it used to protect those secrets from disclosure, the court still dismissed the company’s DTSA claims.