Note: the following article was reported by Charles Ornstein of ProPublica, Dec. 10, 2015, 5 a.m. and is reproduced under Creative Commons license. Although Ornstein did not mention it in his reporting, the case of Tami Matteson was previously covered on this site in 2013 in a post entitled ” ‘Small’ breach, big harm.” In that article,…
Search Results for: Premera
Seek and ye shall find: CareFirst notifies brokers and members of 2014 breach
Sometimes doing the right thing can be costly. In the wake of increasing attacks on health insurers (e.g., Anthem, Premera), CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield retained Mandiant to do an end-to-end assessment of their information security environment. The assessment included multiple scans to determine if there was any evidence of any attack. On April 21, 2015, Mandiant uncovered evidence…
Data hacked from U.S. government dates back to 1985: U.S. official
Andrea Shalal and Matt Spetalnick report: Data stolen from U.S. government computers by suspected Chinese hackers included security clearance information and background checks dating back three decades, U.S. officials said on Friday, underlining the scope of one of the largest known cyber attacks on federal networks. Of the four million federal employees whose data were…
China’s Hack of U.S. Data Tied to Health-Care Record Thefts
Michael A Riley and John Walcott report: The disclosure by U.S. officials that Chinese hackers stole records of as many as 4 million government workers is now being linked to the thefts of personal information from health-care companies. Forensic evidence indicates that the group of hackers responsible for the U.S. government breach announced Thursday likely…
Rushed data breach notification can aid the attackers
Eric M. Friedman of Stroz Friedberg argues that rushing data breach notification may aid the criminals and cause greater harm to the very consumers we are trying to protect by notification. He writes, in part: One of the most important and time consuming tasks is scanning the massive corporate network for evidence of intrusion. These…
Former Aetna employee arrested; found in possession of members’ identity information
Aetna Insurance has also reported a breach in recent months, but unlike the Anthem and Premera Blue Cross breaches, the Aetna breach does not appear to have been a massive one. In a letter dated January 8, the insurance company notified the Maryland Attorney General’s Office that six Maryland residents were among those being notified that their information had…