Top 10 Privacy Headlines from USA The 2010 theft of an unencrypted laptop containing confidential health care information made front-page news in 2013, not because a huge number of patients were affected, but for the exact opposite reason. On January 17, 2013, the federal Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS"), Office for Civil Rights ("OCR"), issued the long-anticipated final omnibus amendments. On April 3, 2013, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) held a workshop at the Department of Commerce in which it offered a sneak preview of the Cybersecurity Framework required under the recently-issued Executive Order on critical infrastructure cybersecurity. A company's best defense against any of these potential pitfalls is to take the steps necessary to sufficiently protect all proprietary and customer data. The privacy and security standards under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ("HIPAA") and its regulations were designed to protect personal health information from unfettered use for commercial purposes. In a recent panel discussion, one of the speakers was a so-called "ethical hacker" - a hacker-turned-protector of employers' confidential information. On April 22 Verizon released its 2013 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), which has since 2008 become a leading annual survey of data breaches, with participants across the globe. A discussion on a case where a perpetrator ran off with a safe and the store's backup disk including confidential information relating to prescriptions, names, addresses and medications. Hardly a day goes by without hearing horrible stories of a person having their identity stolen and their finances ruined as a result. The Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC") and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the "CFTC") recently adopted rules requiring entities subject to their respective enforcement authorities to adopt and implement programs to detect and respond to indicators of possible identity theft, as required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (the "Dodd-Frank Act"). | 
