Dental HMO Data Breach

The data breach involves approximately seventy five thousand people:

“…The Dental Network — a CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield dental HMO — exposed the personal information, including Social Security numbers, on a public Web site last month but didn’t notify members until three weeks later, the Baltimore Sun reported Wednesday. The information was on Dental Network’s site for about two weeks because of a technical error.”

link: Dental HMO data accidentally posted online

It is curious why there was a delay of three weeks before notification was made public. Is there any plausible good reason for such a wait before informing the victims that their personal information had been compromised?

At standard rates, credit monitoring is about ten dollars per file. If just twenty five to thirty per cent of the people avail themselves of the credit monitoring, the costs to the HMO runs into the hundreds of thousand dollars. The unfortunate part is that credit monitoring for a year is just the bare minimum. The people who have had their personal information, including Social Security numbers, will have to monitor their credit for well over a year.

Catherine Forsythe
Director of Operations
FlyingHamster: http://flyinghamster.com/

Tags: dental hmo, data breach, privacy, security, identity theft, credit monitoring, social security numbers