Around 1,700 brokers for Blue Cross/ Blue Shield of Louisiana had their personal data exposed in late September. Around September 25th, an email that was being sent to brokers to make them aware of a software upgrade, ended up including their personal data as an attachment, in error. The data exposed included addresses, phone numbers and social security numbers. No customer data was included with this email and this email was not sent to customers. Only brokers are involved.

Blue Cross did attempt to recall the email before it was completely transmitted, however, the email was erroneously delivered. Brokers were notified and asked to confirm deletion of the email. Blue Cross did apologize to these brokers for the error.

Free credit monitoring is being offered to these brokers for a one year period. The company is taking steps to insure that this type of occurrence is not repeated.

With so many data breaches taking place,  LifeLock offers an array of valuable services to help prevent the crime of identity theft for those who feel they might be at risk. Remember that identity theft can happen to anyone at anytime. The time it would take to repair your credit once someone has tarnished it, would be hundreds of hours. Stolen identities are used more than once. Thieves will use them as much as possible before moving on to another victim, which leaves quite a mess to be cleaned up. Think about using LifeLock,  the value of having the membership is priceless.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 9:43 am and is filed under Data Breach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.