February 14, 2010 – 1:53 pm
Data breach at AvMed makes three health insurer data breaches in three months
If the question is when will health care insurers begin protecting their customers’ identities, health information and financial information, in light of the most recent insurer data breach, the answer has to be “when pigs fly.”
AvMed began sending out notifications this week of [...]
January 13, 2010 – 3:06 pm
2009 Identity Theft Resource Center Breach Report
The Identity Theft Resource Center’s numbers on last years’ data breaches are out, but despite some figures that are seemingly good news, the overall picture is muddled if not outright bleak.
Nearly 500 data breaches were reported last year – a 25% decrease from 2008. That’s the first decrease in [...]
December 17, 2009 – 2:59 pm
This is the time of year when all the Top 10, Best of, and Worst of lists come out. And just for the folks who worry about data breaches, information security, identity theft and institutional stupidity, ComputerWorld has rolled out their 2009 Data Breach Hall of Shame.
In no particular order–but each special in its own [...]
December 11, 2009 – 1:04 pm
A data breach is never a good thing, but when the data breach isn’t discovered for three years, and then those responsible wait two months before notifying those affected and at risk of ID theft … Well, 24,000 University of Notre Dame employees are confronting that situation.
Files containing the employees’ names, Social Security numbers, birth [...]
December 4, 2009 – 3:38 pm
Members will be receiving mail from BlueCross BlueShield any day now, but it won’t be Christmas cards. Instead, they’ll be getting letters warning them that they are at a heightened risk from ID theft because their personal, financial and even medical information may be among the millions of records missing after 57 computer hard drives [...]
October 19, 2009 – 9:59 am
The Virginia state government has suffered another major data breach, their second this year. The most recent occurred September 21 when an unencrypted flash drive containing the names, Social Security numbers and employment and demographic information of 103,000 people was lost.
Those affected either took an adult education class between April 2007 and January 2009, or [...]
October 8, 2009 – 12:29 pm
As many as 850,000 physicians may be affected by theft of a BlueCross BlueShield employee’s laptop. Physicians’ names addresses, federal tax ID numbers and national provider numbers were contained in an unencrypted file on the laptop.
The data breach presents the possibility of massive medical insurance fraud, but the 187,000 doctors who used their Social Security [...]
Yes, there was a time when a hacker was a pimply-faced guy sitting in his parents’ basement surrounded by pizza boxes and bulky PCs. But that’s not who’s responsible for data breaches in this millennium.
Increasingly, it’s insiders who are stealing their organizations’ information, according to recent studies.
A wise-ass hacker has broken into the Virginia Department of Health Professionals, and is demanding $10 million in ransom for the return of the stolen information. According to Wikileaks.org, the hacker stole the data, encrypted it, and posted the following ransom not on the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program website:
“I have your shit. In *my* possession, [...]
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