Another day, another massive security breach: Anthem Health Insurance

Personal information including addresses, birthdays, medical identification numbers, social security numbers and some income data belonging to both current and former customers were swept up in the cyber attack, according to a statement from Anthem CEO Joseph Swedish. In somewhat of a silver lining, at this time the company does not believe the hackers stole any medical information or payment information.

techcrunch

I'm all for digitizing as much as possible, save the trees and all, but sheesh, are we ever going to be able to keep data secure?

This latest breach includes personal data on nearly 80 million people. Anthem (my family's medical insurer) says they will provide free identity and credit repair coverage. Here is the link to the website they've set up to inform customers.
I think I'm still covered by Home Depot's free coverage from a few months back. This is past ridiculous.


Watch your credit reports, folks...

a reply to: Olivine

When businesses ask for my email when I purchase something I used to say can you guarantee it wont ever go to another party....then the clerk would reply "we don't sell your information" which was a lie anyway but then Id say well what if it gets hacked...can I hold you personally responsible....then theyd say they don't need my email...sorry to pick on the clerks but I can't stand when they ask for my email for buying something in their store face to face.

Might be a bit off-topic, but "going digital" has actually increased our paper usage. We're using 50% more paper than we did before computers.

Source

On topic: Health Insurance companies typically have a pretty robust system of network security, since there's HIPAA rules to abide by in storing client information. This is pretty surprising.

a reply to: ScientificRailgun

I agree with you about the breach being surprising, but I guess it shouldn't be.

Criminals will attack easy targets, and I just read that Anthem was fined in 2013 for security weaknesses:

Federal officials said Anthem had inadequate safeguards in an online application database and left names, birthdates, Social Security numbers and health data accessible to unauthorized people.

www.latimes.com...

Im starting to think that these security breaches are part of a bigger picture going on here. Either Russia has had enough and is turning there top notch hackers loose to create problems for the west. Or does it go further than that, and comes full circle back to our own Gov, which is creating its own hack problems to sell the idea, of internet being controlled by and regulated by the gov. Something is going on here. I just don't believe that these hacks are coming from independent people who just want to create problems, this is tied to something for someones agenda

a reply to: Olivine

What is actually happening is that NSA and CIA don't have complete their data and they are hacking mega servers that hold this information

This has been happening a lot in the past 4 years