Well, it is all over the news. A pharmacy benefits management company, Express Scripts, has reported that they received an extortion letter that is threatening to expose patient records that number into the millions. The company is being required to pay a large sum of money to prevent this data breach from taking place. The letter is a great concern due to the fact that it did contain names, social security number, dates of birth and prescription information on several of their patients’ records. Express Scripts received this letter last month and has now seen fit to make the matter known to the public.

Data breaches are very common now, but receiving an extortion letter is not. An investigation is being run by the company, along with outside professionals, including the FBI. The company has not complied with the letter by paying out any money. At this point, the company is not aware of any patient information being misused. It is possible that this scam is being run by an insider with the company, although the investigation has not yet revealed so.

Last month, the FBI reported that they arrested a man who is accused of stealing a computer server from an AIG subsidiary and using it to try to extort over $200,000 from AIG or he would publish the data on the internet. According to a spokesman for AIG, no personal data was released in regard to this extortion attempt.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 8:05 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.