More than 80 million patient records were stolen out of Anthem’s servers.
If you are an Anthem, Blue Cross or Blue Shield customer, now or in the past, you are probably affected by the breach.
The data stolen included at least Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, email addresses and employment information.
Not included in the breach (or at least disclosed as being part) were credit card numbers or medical data.
Why is the Anthem breach so serious?
When breach includes so much data on each victim, especially your Social Security number, it makes it fairly easy for cyber criminals and identity thieves to create new accounts in your name or takeover existing financial accounts. In other words, they can bank as you, borrow as you and pose as you in order to financially exploit you.
Data Breach Expert Alert: The restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s China Bistro has reported a security breach that may have led to the theft of customer data from credit and debit cards used at 33 restaurants. In addition to stolen card numbers, the intruder may have gotten names and expiration dates as well. The breach took place between October 19th of 2013 and June 11th of 2014 and supposedly has affected 33 locations.
If P.F. Changs follows in the footsteps of the recent Target breach, you can expect an expanding number of stores and customers affected over the coming days. It seems that the data breach playbook suggests that companies initially under-report the severity of the security lapse in order to keep customer shock and defection to a minimum. Once the news cycle has worn out the topic (generally 3-5 days), the breached company generally issues news on additional stores affected, customer data lost, increases in the actual data affected, etc. Let’s hope P.F. Chang’s does a better job of communicating damage the first time.
When will corporations learn? I received 6 data breach emails yesterday because of the Epsilon’s lack of security.
Have you been inundated with more spam and phishing emails recently? If so, it may be due to one of the largest email and data breaches in Internet history. Epsilon is one of the world’s largest providers of marketing-email services and they handle more than 40 billion emails annually and more than 2,200 global brands.
Epsilon issued the following statement: “On March 30th, an incident was detected where a subset of Epsilon clients’ customer data were exposed by an unauthorized entry into Epsilon’s email system. The information that was obtained was limited to email addresses and/or customer names only.”
The Social Security numbers, grades, and other personal identity information of over 40,000 former University of Hawaii students were posted online. The information was removed earlier this week, after almost 12 months online. The University apologized and explained that a faculty member doing a study on student success rates believed the information was being held on a secure server. It was not.
Apparently this was the third such breach that the University has suffered from in the past year. Each incident has increased student concern, and the university promises to beef up network security. It is beginning to look like these are promises that they have little intention of keeping. If the University were serious, they would immediately implement a data privacy awareness program to train staff and students on protecting private and sensitive information. There is no indication beyond empty press releases that they have begun taking even this most basic step.
In August 2010, the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse published its latest Chronology of Data Breaches, which showed that since 2005 more than a half-billion sensitive records have been breached. Of those breached records — which contained such sensitive data as customer credit card or social security numbers — approximately one-fifth came from retailers, merchants and other types of non-financial, non-insurance-related businesses, the majority of which were small to midsized.
An equally scary statistic: approximately 80 percent of small businesses that experience a data breach go bankrupt or suffer severe financial losses within two years of a security breach, according to John Sileo, a professional identity theft consultant and speaker, who knows firsthand about the havoc a security breach can wreak on a small business.
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Data Breach Expert Alert: The restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s China Bistro has reported a security breach that may have led to the theft of customer data from credit and debit cards used at 33 restaurants. In addition to stolen card numbers, the intruder may have gotten names and expiration dates as well. The breach took place between 
