ePHI stands for electronic protected health information. Electronic protected health information is protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, commonly known as HIPAA. ePHI security is governed by the HIPAA Security Rule. With the rise of telehealth, covered entities need to understand the requirements for safely transmitting, storing, and using ePHI to be compliant with the Security Rule and to protect a patient’s privacy.

Title II of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) has two key provisions: the Privacy Rule and the HIPAA Security Rule. The Privacy Rule establishes standards for protecting certain health information, or PHI. The Privacy Rule requires those organizations that are governed by HIPAA (covered entities) to implement safeguards to protect the privacy of PHI, and gives individuals the right to access and share their health records.

Another day, another data breach has become a common refrain, in a world saturated with data breaches and other types of data exposures. But over the past few years, a subtle change in the nature of breaches has taken place. We documented some of this change in our analysis of the 100 largest breaches in the 21st century, highlighting that breaches were getting larger and more likely the result of misconfigurations.

Today, for enterprises and even SMB companies, IT is a sprawling but interconnected universe of applications, devices, and services all running in tandem to maintain the lifeblood of these organizations—data. Navigating the complexities of this arrangement is not just a challenge for security teams (something which Nightfall customers have attested to, before adopting our platform), it’s a genuine challenge for anyone who must manage and use information.

Broadly speaking, an information security program is a set of activities and initiatives that support a company’s information technology while protecting the security of business data and enabling the company to accomplish its business objectives. An information security program safeguards the proprietary information of the business and its customers. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) has a more specific definition of what a security information program should entail.

In early April, the tech industry witnessed a major GitHub security incident targeting GitHub organizations using Heroku and Travis CI. GitHub was made aware of this threat via an attack leveraging AWS API keys to GitHub’s own npm production infrastructure. As upstream security risks within SaaS platforms become more common, organizations that leverage these platforms are relying on tools like Nightfall to protect themselves.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) aims to protect consumer financial privacy with three provisions: the Financial Privacy Rule, the Safeguards Rule, and the Pretexting Provisions. In our previous post, we covered the GLBA Financial Privacy Rule and what financial institutions, as defined by the GLBA, need to know to be compliant.

We’re pleased to announce that Nightfall has joined Snyk’s Technology Alliance Partner Program (TAPP). Nightfall will sit alongside partners like RedHat, and Hashicorp to provide critical DevSecOps functionality to developers.

Last month’s revelation that Okta had been hacked created a seismic impact in the world of security, with organizations still bracing themselves for the fallout from this incident. While resources, like Microsoft’s article on Lapsus$ (tracked as DEV-0537), have broadly dissected the attack vectors used in the group’s attacks, we wanted to expand on the broader trends and context surrounding the Okta hack.

PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. This standard is set forth by the PCI Security Standards Council, an organization founded in 2006 by American Express, Discover, JCB International, Mastercard and Visa Inc. The PCI DSS sets security rules for any business that accepts their cards, with the goal of protecting customer credit and debit card data. Any business that accepts any non-cash payments needs to meet the PCI standards.