Dave Flessner reports:
Another 301,628 current and former members of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee soon will be getting letters alerting them that their personal information was included on computer hard drives stolen from the insurance company last year.
The Chattanooga-based health insurer announced today that the number of affected customers with potentially compromised identification and health information has more than doubled from the 220,133 persons already notified about the identity threat.
[…]
BlueCross still is accessing records of those whose names and addresses — but not Social Security numbers and other sensitive identity data — may be on the hard drives. Mr. Vaughn said even more people are likely to be contacted.
[…]
“The company seems to be bending over backwards to alert anyone whose records may be involved and authorities in the states where the affected people live,” said Deven McGraw, a privacy advocate with Center for Democracy and Technology. “It’s costing them a huge amount of money. They could have avoided this if they would have spent just a little bit more on the front end to better secure these hard drives or use data encryption to protect the records.”
Read more in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.