State Farm Insurance announced this week that one of their employees help himself to customers’ names, addresses, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, and maybe even their financial account numbers. The information was then used to open credit card accounts.

This latest data breach brings the number of records exposed to data breaches to more than 244 million since 2005 when the Privacy Right Clearinghouse began tracking them. In many instances the government or corporate agencies involved can’t determine how many records were lost or stolen, so the total number of records is assumed to be much higher.

In that time, many of the data breaches can be attributed to insurance companies, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which wouldn’t disclose details of how the lapse occurred in 2005, but did say 6,000 records were lost.

In 2006, Blue Cross and Blue Shield mailed out information about a new insurance product to 600 customers…with their SSNs printed on the mailing labels. Also that year, BC/BS was affected when a private contractor stole names and SSNs of 27,000 employees, vendors and other contractors.

An Aetna employee’s laptop was stolen from his car in 2006. On the laptop were names, addresses and SSNs of 38,000 employees of the Department of Defense and Omni Hotels.

Buckeye Community Health Plan, 2006: 72,000 customers’ information stolen. Again in 2006, AIG lost personal information on 930,000 customers when a computer server was stolen. ING had two data breaches, both in June 2006 affecting 21,500 people; both incidents involved stolen laptops.

More than a half million New Yorkers who had filed worker comp claims lost data in what the NY Attorney General’s office determined was a violation of the state’s security breach law. Luckily, the stolen computer was later recovered and no data had been stolen.

A stolen lockbox contained compete information from 200,000 customers of Aetna/Nationwide/Wellpoint health plans.

And that’s just a small snapshot of insurance company data breaches in 2006.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Data breach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.