If you had filed an insurance application at Anthem Blue Cross and your application was pending, there is every bit of chance that your sensitive information including Credit Card details and Social Security number were exposed.
As per the information published in a latest article on Orange county website, over 200,000 Anthem Blue Cross customers received letters in 3rd week of June which informed them about possible breach of their personal information due to a suspected attack on the company’s website.
The company is contacting customers whose application status was pending since the information was viewed through an on-line tool that allows users to track the status of their application.
According to the officials at Anthem Blue Cross:
“The ability to manipulate the web address (URL) was available for a relatively short period of time following an upgrade to the system. After the upgrade was completed, a third party vendor validated that all security measures were in place, when in fact they were not. As soon as the situation was discovered, we made the necessary security changes to prevent it from happening again.”
Obviously the victims are angered by the incident,
47 year old, Hal Ziegler of Mission Viejo said, “There’s not one place that has more information on you than your health insurer,”. “It’s the absolutely most personal level of information all the way down to Social Security numbers. That would be about the last place I would want someone to gain access.”
57 year old Luckett who bought an individual policy in February said, “I’m thinking this is the 21st century”. “I expect this company, Anthem Blue Cross, to protect my information.”
In return the Anthem officials have apologized and have offered to provide a free one year of identity protection service to potential affected customers.
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