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Military Healthcare Data Stolen
An anonymous reader writes "TriWest, a federal contractor providing healthcare to the military, had computer hardware stolen from one of their offices. Social security numbers, credit card numbers, and healthcare information about 500,000 US military personnel and their families is contained on the stolen hardware. The AP picked up the story. The theft is also being covered by the Salt Lake Tribune and the Arizona Republic. This opens the door to speculation about who would be interested in the data held by a military contractor and what they will do with the information."
Tricare is administered by regions. When you enroll in tricare, you are assigned to a region.
Northeast, Mid-atlantic, Gulfsouth, etc.
There is no TRICARE West region... but judging by the number of states mentioned in the article, I'd guess this contractor was dealing with the Central region (15 states), with the possible addition of california (1 state, obviously), or the Northwest region (2 states)
Just FYI.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Keep in mind that when geeks like us talk about 'harddrives', that's not the same thing as what the general population refers to as 'harddrives'. Nearly every non-geek I've met thinks that the case is the hard drive.
These thieves may have stolen the computers (leaving the bulky monitors), and the non-geek reporter wrote that they only took the harddrives.
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This is exactly what happened recently when a computer theft racket was exposed where young kids were sent to steal machines from schools here.
Whoever reported it wrote that kids were paid up to $AUS500 for each "hard drive" stolen from schools - the reality is kids were allegedly paid this much for stealing brand new fileservers and laptops.
a grrl & her server