Health benefits company exposes data online
The personal information of about 128,000 WellPoint customers from several states was publicly available on the internet.What type of personal information? Social Security numbers and pharmacy and medical data.
What happened? WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurer by membership, blames the security lapse on an insecure server managed by an unnamed third-party vendor.
What was the response? The company offered free credit-monitoring services to affected individuals.
Details: The data contained some protection and could not be discovered through search engines. The problem has been fixed. Earlier this year, another server was improperly secured, resulting in the exposure of personal information of 1,350 WellPoint customers.
Source: Chicago Tribune, chicagotribune.com, "WellPoint customer data may have been accessed via internet," April 8.
