Name:

Description:

data.frame of cyber security breaches involving health care records of 500 or more humans reported to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as of June 27, 2014.

Variables:

A data.frame with 145 observations on the following 14 variables:

Number

integer record number in the HHS data base

Name_of_Covered_Entity

factor giving the name of the entity experiencing the breach

State

Factor giving the 2-letter code of the state where the breach occurred. This has 52 levels for the 50 states plus the District of Columbia (DC) and Puerto Rico (PR).

Business_Associate_Involved

Factor giving the name of a subcontractor (or blank) associated with the breach.

Individuals_Affected

integer number of humans whose records were compromised in the breach. This is 500 or greater; U.S. law requires reports of breaches involving 500 or more records but not of breaches involving fewer.

Date_of_Breach

character vector giving the date or date range of the breach. Recodes as Dates in breach_start and breach_end.

Type_of_Breach

factor with 29 levels giving the type of breach (e.g., "Theft" vs., "Unauthorized Access/Disclosure", etc.)

Location_of_Breached_Information

factor with 41 levels coding the location from which the breach occurred (e.g., "Paper", "Laptop", etc.)

Date_Posted_or_Updated

Date the information was posted to the HHS data base or last updated.

Summary

character vector of a summary of the incident.

breach_start

Date of the start of the incident = first date given in Date_of_Breach above.

breach_end Date of the end of the incident or NA if only one date is given in Date_of_Breach above. year integer giving the year of the breach

Details

The data primarily consists of breaches that occurred from 2010 through early 2014 when the extract was taken. However, a few breaches are recorded including 1 from 1997, 8 from 2002-2007, 13 from 2008 and 56 from 2009. The numbers of breaches from 2010 - 2014 are 211, 229, 227, 254 and 56, respectively. (A chi-square test for equality of the counts from 2010 through 2013 is 4.11, which with 3 degrees of freedom has a significance probability of 0.25. Thus, even though the lowest number is the first and the largest count is the last, the apparent trend is not statistically significant under the usual assumption of independent Poisson trials.)

The following corrections were made to the file:

Link To Google Sheets:

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References/Notes/Attributions:

Author(s)

Spencer Graves

Source

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Health Information Privacy: Breaches Affecting 500 or More Individuals

See Also

HHSCyberSecurityBreaches for a version of these data downloaded more recently. This newer version includes changes in reporting and in the variables included in the data.frame.

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