Personal information of at least 80 million present and past customers of Anthem, the country’s second-largest health insurance company was stolen in the latest security breach impacting the organization. Information obtained by the hackers include Social Security Numbers, Medical IDs, Names, Employment information, including income data.
The CEO of the company, Joseph Swedish confirmed this in a statement posted on a website created for the incident saying “Anthem was the target of a very sophisticated external cyber attack.” Since, actual medical information does not appear to have been stolen, the breach would therefore not come under the 1996 HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rules which requires that firms provide adequate confidentiality and security of medical information. Also, no credit card information appeared to have been obtained, as reported by USA Today.
According to Mandiant, the computer security firm Anthem has hired to evaluate its systems following the breach, this will be “the largest health care breach to date,” said Vitor De Souza, a spokesman for the security company.
