Not long ago, health insurance giant Anthem suffered a security breach of historic proportions, one which exposed personal data on as many as 80 million current and former customers. While Anthem is taking steps to repair the public relations damage, it’s beginning to look like even its $100 million cyber security insurance policy is ludicrously inadequate to address what could be an $8B to $16B problem. (That’s assuming, as many cyber security pros do, that it costs $100 to $200 per customer exposed to restore normalcy.)
But the full extent of the healthcare industry hack may be even greater than that. As information begins to filter out about what happens, a Forbes report suggests that the cyber security intrusion at Anthem may be linked to another security breach — exposing 4.5 million records — that took place less than six months months ago at Community Health Systems:
Analysis of open source information on the cybercriminal infrastructure likely used to siphon 80 million Social Security numbers and other sensitive data from health insurance giant Anthem suggests the attackers may have first gained a foothold in April 2014, nine months before the company says it discovered the intrusion. Brian Krebs ‒ Anthem Breach May Have Started in April, 2014
Class action suits against CHS were filed last August, alleging negligence by the hospital giant. Anthem also faces class action suits alleging security negligence in Indiana, California, Alabama and Georgia. But the damage to both companies’ image has already been done, damage that can’t be repaired by even the most favorable legal outcome. (In fact, the longer these cases linger in court, the more time the public has to permanently brand the defendants as having been irresponsible.)
What makes these exploits particularly unfortunate is that they may have been quite preventable. Security experts say Anthem, along with CHS, may well have been hit by a well-known and frequently leveraged vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library known as the Heartbleed Bug. A fix for Heartbleed, which was introduced in 2011, has been available since April of last year. Though outside experts haven’t drawn final conclusions, many have surmised that neither Anthem nor CHS made the necessary fix which would have protected them against Heartbleed.
Both companies have released defensive statements contending that these security breaches were due to tremendously sophisticated attacks — something they’d have to do even if a third-grade script kiddie hacked their infrastructure. But the truth is, note security analysts, the attacks almost certainly succeeded because of a serious lack of internal controls.
By gaining admin credentials to the database there was nothing ‒ including encryption ‒ to stop the attack. The only thing that did stop it was a lucky administrator who happened to be paying attention at the right time. Ken Westin – Senior Security Analyst at Tripwire
As much these companies would like to convince us that the cyber security breaches weren’t really their fault — that they were victims of exotic hacker gods with otherworldly skills — the bottom line is that this doesn’t seem to …read more
