Personal and confidential data of some 75,000 people was leaked after hackers were able to access a government system used by insurance agents and brokers to sign up customers for healthcare plans. This system was connected to the Healthcare.gov website, the main landing page for anyone who wants to sign up for an insurance plan under the Affordable Care Act.
The Healthcare.gov site itself wasn’t hacked. The attack was on the system that’s used by insurance agents to enroll customers in new plans directly. As you can probably imagine, customers have to provide a lot of personal data when signing up for a healthcare plan.
This includes but isn’t limited to their names, addresses, social security numbers, and more. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has confirmed this breach but it didn’t say what sort of data was stolen. It hasn’t even explained just how this data breach came to be.
It reiterated that the main Healthcare.gov website wasn’t affected and that this hack doesn’t affect the open enrollment in new healthcare plans that’s set for November 1st either. The team is “working to identify the individuals potentially impacted as quickly as possible so that we can notify them and provide resources such as credit protection.”