As banks have beefed up their cyber security in the recent months after a JP Morgan Chase announced a data breach, hackers seemed to have turned their sights onto healthcare providers and insurance companies. Last week medical insurance company Anthem publicly apologized to its customers for a data breach that could have leaked over 80 million records that included names, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers. The company has described the data breach as a “very sophisticated external cyber-attack”. Anthem is still investigating whether the hackers were able to obtain any sensitive medical records or patient history. The data breach could be one of the largest in history.
The data breach recently came to light after an employee at Anthem notice suspicious activity of their user account. The data breach is currently being investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a private security firm that Anthem hired to help audit the data breach.
The Anthem data breach echos President Obama’s recent State of the Union address where he pledged to spend more money on cyber-security in the United States. However most security experts agree that most data breaches are the result of basic flaws in computer security, social deception, failure to protect user names and passwords properly, or failure to encrypt sensitive data, and not the result of weak or faulty computer security methods currently in place.