Data breaches leave almost 1 million Blue Cross Blue Shield customers vulnerable to ID theft
Blue Cross Blue Shield is the oldest and largest health insurance company in the country, providing health insurance to every one in three Americans. They identify themselves as “a federation of 39 independent, community-based, locally owned companies.” Unfortunately, they aren’t doing a great job of securing their customers’ personal information.
The most recent of nine Blue Cross Blue Shield data breaches occurred September 30 in Louisiana when an email was sent out to brokers. The names, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers of 1,700 customers were exposed when an attachment was inadvertently sent out with the email.
Compared to other recent data breaches that left millions of Americans vulnerable to identity theft, this data breach is small. But since February 2006 Blue Cross Blue Shield has suffered eight other information losses that have affected a total of more than 900,000 of their customers.
More than half of the BC/BS data breaches have occurred this year alone, and are responsible for 618,000 customer exposures. None of the nine total breaches have been traced to the activities of nefarious hackers; all are attributed to careless and irresponsible handling of their customers’ most sensitive information.
- July 2008: 202,000 customer letters were mailed out to the wrong customers
- March 2008: personal information on 75,000 customers was posted to an unprotected website
- March 2008: data on 40,000 customers was on a lost laptop computer
- January 2008: data on 300,000 customers was on a stolen laptop computer
- March 2007: data on 75,000 customers on an unencrypted disk that was lost but later found
- January 2007: data on 196,000 customers on a cassette tape stolen from a vendor
- February 2006: data on 27,000 customers sent to a contractor’s home computer
- February 2006: letters sent to 600 customers with their Social Security numbers printed on the mailing labels
(All information for this article was obtained from A Chronology of Data Breaches, a website of The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.)
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