Study: Wellpoint Glitch exposed sensitive data to public
June 30th, 2010 - 8:56 pm ICT by Aishwarya BhattCalifornia, Jun 30 (THAINDIAN NEWS) About 470,000 people who applied for the WellPoint Inc (WLP.N) health insurance have been told because of a fault on their website, their social security numbers and other important information could have had been made public.
The company, which is one of the top ten health insurers in the United States, only realized the problem in March, and immediately fixed the fault. The fault came about as a result of their website upgrade last October, which was handled by a contractor.
The specific number of people whose data was exposed on the website are not known yet, by the health insurer but the issue is under investigation.
“At this time we don’t know exactly whose information was accessed,” said Cindy Sanders, who is the company’s spokeswoman. She confirmed that the flaw affected individual policies for people under 65 years. As compensation the company is offering one year of identity-theft protection to all the affected customers.
Sanders also refused to comment on the cost of the security flaw to the health insurer, whose shares went down on the New York Stock Exchange, when the news of the flaw was released to the public.
The insurer is present in 14 states in the US, including California and Colorado.
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