Dive Brief:
- About 5,800 doctors at Anthem Blue Cross of California are in the process of being notified that their Social Security or tax identification numbers were accidentally posted online.
- PDF documents containing physicians' SSNs and tax ID number were posted to Anthem.com for more than 24 hours on October 23, the company said; the documents were intended to help individuals looking for information about doctors in some of its provider networks.
- Anthem is offering free credit monitoring to providers affected by the data breach.
Dive Insight:
According to security research firm the Ponemon Institute, the cost of a data breach due to employee mistakes is $159 per record on average. So even a one-day exposure of doctors' information must have been costly for Anthem, which will have to work at figure out what part of its security process failed. That being said, Anthem is fortunate that the breach wasn't caused by a malicious or criminal attack -- that clocks in at $277 per compromised record. All told, Anthem may have gotten off relatively easily.