Empire Blue recovers lost data

According to Forbes, and a press release issued yesterday, Empire Blue has lucked out.

Back in January, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield lost a CD containing unprotected personal data (health and ID) for 75,000 members. Wendesday, it was found.

The CD was sent via UPS from a third party vendor to Magellan Behavioral Health services, and was lost in transit. The CD has now been found, although where it was found, and whether privacy information has been breached, was not mentioned. Empire is offering free credit monitoring for a year to those members who may be affected – a cost to the company of about $179 per customer. If all 75,000 members accepted this credit monitoring, you can see how costly this could get.

Empire Blue had a standard for encryption of data that was not followed. The standard is now being raised to remove CDs entirely from the process of data transfers. Confidential information may now be sent only via encrypted email or a secured website.

More often that we care to realize, we burn CDs or send emails without regard to the encryption of data. The data we store on our computers is vulnerable in many ways to data breach and we should be more sensitive to all the ways we store and transmit that data.

Tags: empire blue, empire, empire blue cross blue shield, data breach, data loss, encryption, data transfer