Credit: CareFirst
- 1.1 Million User Records Have Been Stolen From A Health Insurance Company
Around 1.1 million user records were stolen from CareFirst which is a health insurance company.
The CareFirst health insurance company has announced on its website that almost 1.1 million user records have been stolen after their network was a victim of a cyber-attack. Their company had records of both current and former members.
This insurance company which is currently operating in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, say that they have a total of 3.4 million users. In a statement the health insurance company said that 1.1 million records had been stolen back in June 2014.
They said that they were doing a security refresh when they found that their records were stolen. They were doing this security refresh so that they could offer better security. CareFirst claim that the hackers had only accessed one database.
Now the names, birth dates, email addresses and member identification numbers are in the hands of those hackers. CareFirst also said that they don’t take the member’s social security number and any credit card info. If they did take that info and stored it into their databases, then the member’s would had been in a lot of trouble.
The company has now decided to block the user accounts and they have asked the members to simply create new ones. This is not the first time any health care company’s records were stolen.
“We deeply regret the concern this attack /4/cause”, said CareFirst President and CEO Chet Burrell.
“We are making sure those affected understand the extent of the attack – and what information was and was not affected. Even though the information in question would be of limited use to an attacker, we want to protect our members from any potential use of their information and will be offering free credit monitoring and identity theft protection for those affected for two years.”
Just a year ago Anthem was hacked and up to 98.6 million user records were stolen from the company. When you compare the numbers, CareFirst got away with just a slap on the wrist. Now the health care industry will think twice before asking the user their vital information.
They will also think twice before adding the information to their computers. These health care companies need to hire hackers so that they could test their own company’s network security.
This will make their networks stronger and will make things harder for other hackers who that want to access the information. Companies like CareFirst need to make changes to better their security for the future.