75,000 Healthcare.Gov Portal Users Affected by Data Breach
Last updated November 8, 2018
- Private information belonging to 75,000 individuals was exposed after Healthcare.gov’s sign-up system was compromised.
- The breach was revealed by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).
- The security incident has been caused due to “anomalous system activity.”
Government healthcare sign-up system Healthcare.gov was compromised recently according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. CMS revealed that the data breach occurred due to an “anomalous system activity” that was detected last week in the Direct Enrollment system. It is unknown why the agency did not reveal the incident sooner.
Accounts that were linked to suspicious activity have been deactivated, and further investigation is going on. Healthcare.gov is used by Americans to enroll themselves to healthcare plans under the Affordable Care Act’s insurance package, also known as Obamacare.
CMS Administrator Seema Verma revealed “I want to make clear to the public that HealthCare.gov and the Marketplace Call Center are still available, and open enrollment will not be negatively impacted. We are working to identify the individuals potentially impacted as quickly as possible so that we can notify them and provide resources such as credit protection.”
Healthcare.gov is used by agents and brokers alike to help US citizens to sign up for insurance coverage. According to the data breach report, only the sign-up data was affected, and no personal healthcare information has been stolen from the portal. However, details on what exactly was stolen by the attackers have not been revealed. With applicants asked to supply their social security numbers during the sign-up process, many users are afraid that their Social Security numbers may have been compromised. The affected system is currently disabled and will be restored before the end of the week.
This is not the first time a government agency has been affected by a data breach in the United States. Recently, 30,000 DOD civilian and military personnel had their private data affected by a data breach. The breach occurred on October 4, less than two weeks before the Healthcare.gov data breach.
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