Hard Drives Containing Information on 500,000 Patients Stolen from BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee

January 26, 2010 – 1:27 pm

Bad news if you’re a BlueCross BlueShield member in the Volunteer state. Fifty-seven hard drives that contained personal information on around 500,000 BCBS members has been stolen according to the insurance company. The theft happened on October 2nd when an unidentified thief stole the drives from a closet in the BlueCross Call Center in Chattanooga.

These drives included identity information including social security numbers, addresses, birth dates and medical information. The company says that since that time they have notified over 220,000 potential victims, had 700 employees working on the breech and spent over $7 million to figure out how it happened and to help ensure member’s are not identity theft victims by offering a year’s enrollment in an ID theft prevention service. There has been no evidence that the information has been used in any fraudulent way, but the drives were encoded however the information on them wasn’t encrypted.

That’s not to say the information that was stolen won’t pop up eventually. Thieves sometimes spend months trying to unlock the information stored on stolen laptops and hard drives. Then they offer the information up for sale on various criminal online marketplaces. Think of them as evil eBays where people big on your personal identity information.

Thankfully LifeLock has recently announced their Command Center membership that actively scans and notifies you if your information appears on one of these websites. That added layer of protection is something that no other ID theft prevention service offers and is a great reason to look at becoming a LifeLock member.

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