Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Hackers stole income, immigration and tax data in Healthcare.gov breach, government confirms
Hackers siphoned off thousands of Healthcare.gov applications by breaking into the accounts of brokers and agents tasked with helping customers sign up for healthcare plans.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said in a post buried on its website that the hackers obtained “inappropriate access” to a number of broker and agent accounts, which “engaged in excessive searching” of the government’s healthcare marketplace systems.
CMS didn’t say how the attackers gained access to the accounts, but said it shut off the affected accounts “immediately.”
In a letter sent to affected customers this week (and buried on the Healthcare.gov website), CMS disclosed that sensitive personal data — including partial Social Security numbers, immigration status and some tax information — may have been taken.
According to the letter, the data included:
- Name, date of birth, address, sex, and the last four digits of the Social Security number (SSN), if SSN was provided on the application;
- Other information provided on the application, including expected income, tax filing status, family relationships, whether the applicant is a citizen or an immigrant, immigration document types and numbers, employer name, whether the applicant was pregnant, and whether the applicant already had health insurance;
- Information provided by other federal agencies and data sources to confirm the information provided on the application, and whether the Marketplace asked the applicant for documents or explanations;
- The results of the application, including whether the applicant was eligible to enroll in a qualified health plan (QHP), and if eligible, the tax credit amount; and
- If the applicant enrolled, the name of the insurance plan, the premium, and dates of coverage.
But the government said that no bank account information — including credit card numbers, or diagnostic and treatment information — was taken.
Adding insult to injury
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @09:16AM (2 children)
I am just so happy! That no submissions with biased commentary
make it on to the front page of SoylentNews.
Now if only we had a nice aristarchus submission. That would be something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @06:10PM (1 child)
Let's have the Boudica one! Because the plight of men in the working class, who each wield much more power and wealth than even the wealthiest bourgeois woman, is so much more privileged than the plight of women in the working class....
In fact, the reason Boudica has crap bonuses in Civ is because of a giant conspiracy on the part of programmers everywhere (who we may assume were all assigned the male gender at birth, because there are no women programmers who are real women, due to the giant conspiracy), who are all incels and homosexuals and serial rapists, so they are the scummiest of the scum, demonstrating why homosexual men should be killed, because the only use for a person lacking a functional womb is as a slave, unless she has cisgender privilege, in which case we will just take her word for it that her womb is functional and won't require a medical examination--perhaps only a long-form birth certificate to establish that she was, in fact, assigned the female gender at birth and is not a secret
Kenyan Muslimhomosexual incel.Hopefully I have correctly comprehended the point of aristarchus' submissions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 11 2018, @06:23PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxcJMoCbX2E [youtube.com]