Every so often, we come across a breach involving doctors’ Social Security numbers being exposed online because they use their SSN as their Tax Identification Number (TIN). Here’s another one of those case, this time involving Anthem Blue Cross of California:
We are sending you this letter to notify you that your Tax Identification Number (“TIN”), along with your name and business address, were erroneously displayed on a PDF document posted to the Anthem website, www.anthem.com/ca. The PDF documents were posted to Anthem.com for just over 24 hours, from October 23, 2013 until October 24, 2013, and were intended to assist individuals looking for information about physicians in certain provider networks. It appears that you use your Social Security Number (SSN) as your TIN and thus it was included on this posting. Once Anthem identified the error, we took immediate steps to remove the PDFs from the Anthem.com/ca website. The PDFs were corrected and re-posted without the TINs.
Although we have no reason to believe your SSN was compromised, we are offering you free identity protection services for one year under AllClear ID. AllClear ID offers Credit Monitoring that delivers secure, actionable Credit Alerts to you by phone. AllClear ID Protection also includes $1,000,000 Identity Theft Insurance Coverage and AllClear ID Fraud Resolution Services