Anthem Syndrome

In 2015, Anthem has announced their biggest data breach yet, 80 million people were at risk in having their personal data exposed which may cause identity fraud. This was not the case in just losing a credit card it was much more personal because of the information it contained. Everyone’s social security numbers, previous health records, previous employees and previous address that is the biggest issue in this case. This was called “sophisticated attack” because someone has impersonated as administrator worker. This allows the thieves to go back in later and enter much sensitive information that is not for the public eye. Having an encrypted data is good but it is not enough when such large scale of breach has been done which most likely
involved more than one person. The problem lays is when one can’t tell a difference between a trusted employee and a thieve which is why is it sophisticated. The health care is good at protecting data with HIPAA regulations but it only goes so far when financial aspect is touched. Having segregation in place will have a better protection in financial aspect because there will be much more hoops to just before breaching the system. I am one of the millions of costumers of Anthem and when this occurred it was very nerve wrecking, I had to call and check my bank statements constantly and also get special protection on to my accounts. I work in a health field industry of a big corporation and two years ago we had something similar but not at this amount. We would receive emails from IT departments asking us to update our passwords for our loggings which was connected to everything. It looked just like the real emails we would get so those that have not read the email all the way gone and updated their passwords and basically had their direct deposits stolen. A lot of people were left without a pay and it took months before it all got sorted out and they saw their paycheck.