Anthem Blue Cross hit with data breach

Good morning all. I found a message from our health insurance company, Anthem Blue Cross that they had suffered a massive date breach and that the thieves made off with data on customers as well as current and former employees.

In the email I received, Anthem immediately took action to close the breach and alert it’s customers. Here are some of the details from Reuters by way of Yahoo:

Health insurer Anthem Inc , which has nearly 40 million U.S. customers, said late on Wednesday that hackers had breached one of its IT systems and stolen personal information relating to current and former consumers and employees.

Just…Wonderful.

The No. 2 health insurer in the United States said the breach did not appear to involve medical information or financial details such as credit card or bank account numbers.

Well, that’s something anyway.

The information accessed during the “very sophisticated attack” did include names, birthdays, social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information, including income data, the company said.

I hate to tell you idiots this, but if they got Social Security numbers, they can use that to steal people’s identity. And home addresses? Would you care to guess how valuable that will be to burglars and home invaders?

The company did not say how many customers and staff were affected, but the Wall Street Journal earlier reported it was suspected that records of tens of millions of people had been taken, which would likely make it the largest data breach involving a U.S. health insurer.

Oh great. Looks like it’s time to look into a Lifelock subscription.

Anthem said that it immediately made every effort to close the security vulnerability and reported the attack to the FBI. Cybersecurity firm FireEye Inc said it had been hired to help Anthem investigate the attack.

Really, Anthem doesn’t have a choice in this matter. They are covered under the HIPPA regulations and they have to protect the personal information of their customers.

Anthem said it would send a letter and email to everyone whose information was stored in the hacked database. It also set up an informational website, www.anthemfacts.com, and will offer to provide a credit-monitoring service.

If you use Anthem, I recommend following the link and keeping up to date on what happened. As I understand it, Anthem will be notifying individual customers and employees, (Current and former), who were affected and offering to provide services to monitor their credit and financial data. Hopefully the FBI will be able to track down who did this and recover the data, but honestly, it’s already been sold to other criminals.

Thank you

~The Angry Systems Administrator~

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