By Amanda Grannis
Another day, another data leak. Anthem Inc., an insurance company that has health records of about 80 million employees and customers, is the latest entity to have experienced a security hack. Names, medical histories, Social Security numbers, addresses, were all among the volumes of data that were stolen. This security breach has placed Anthem customers in real danger of identify theft, account fraud, and extortion. Though some suspect that Chinese hackers are responsible for the data break-in, this has yet to be confirmed.
Some say that Anthem is partially responsible for the data leak. This is because the company did not “scramble” its costumers’ data, which would have made it less readable and accessible to hackers. Recently, tales of data breaches (namely the Sony email scandal) have peppered today’s news. Should Anthem have known that its customers’ sensitive data was at risk? Is the insurance company at least negligent for the hacking?
Anthem may have had some reasons to keep its costumers’ data unencrypted. Scrambling data would have made it more difficult for the company to track health care patterns and share data with health care providers in different states. Still, in the “Year of the Hack,” it is difficult to understand why such a large insurance provider would take risks and leave sensitive heath records vulnerable to theft. Journalist Bob Sullivan shares this sentiment, commenting, “Change must come. Data is everyone’s core business now. Firms need to actually take the protection of our data seriously, not merely say they do in letters revealing they’ve been hacked.” Data has truly become “everyone’s core business”, for in the digital age, seemingly every single one of us has our personal information stored in electronic form.
Though we may not ever decide who is really to blame here, one thing is fairly certain. Privacy is becoming even more of a powerful issue in today’s world, and companies must refashion their policies in order to protect it.
Links from this Article
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/anthem-data-breach,news-20411.html
http://www.geekwire.com/2015/lessons-anthem-hack-welcome-post-sony-world-going-get-ugly/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/investigators-eye-china-in-anthem-hack-1423167560
http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/year-hack-billion-records-compromised-2014-n305001