Slashdot Mirror
US Health Insurer Anthem Suffers Massive Data Breach
An anonymous reader writes Anthem, the second-largest health insurer in the United States, has suffered a data breach that may turn out to be the largest health care breach to date, as the compromised database holds records of some 80 million individuals. Not much is known about how the attack was discovered, how it unfolded and who might be behind it, but the breach has been confirmed by the company's CEO Joseph Swedish in a public statement, in which he says they were the victims of a "very sophisticated external cyber attack." The company has notified the FBI, and has hired Mandiant to evaluate their systems and identify solutions to secure them.
Swedish said the breach is extensive: the vulnerable data included "names, birthdays, medical IDs/social security numbers, street addresses, email addresses and employment information, including income data," though "no credit card or medical information, such as claims, test results or diagnostic codes were targeted or compromised." (Also covered by Reuters.)
Why is a healthcare insurance provider collecting income information on the people they insure?
I've worked in employee benefits for over 25 years, and the usual reason is that they are administering more than your health insurance. Often you also have short-term and/or long-term disability insurance, or life insurance. The benefits of these are based on some percentage of your salary. Your short term disability benefit may be 60% of your salary, or your life insurance benefit may be 2 X salary.
In all my time working for insurers like Anthem I have never been asked to pull salary data for anything not related to the above.
It gets better. secure.ssa.gov currently gets an F rating at ssllabs. (Vulnerable to Poodle both sslv3 and TLS).