Major Health Insurer Says Security Breach Could Affect “Tens of Millions” of People

Anthem Inc. is the second largest health insurer in the country and they've revealed that hackers broke into a database which contained personal information for about 80 million of their customers and employees. This is believed to be the largest data breach ever disclosed by a health-care company.

Investigators are still trying to piece things together to determine just how bad the damage is. The breach was discovered last week and Anthem says they believe that that “tens of millions” of records were stolen.

There's good and there's bad news about the breach and what was taken. Anthem says that the hackers obtained names, birthdays, addresses and Social Security numbers but they don't believe that medical information or credit-card or bank-account numbers were stolen and as far as they can tell, none of the stolen data has been sold on the black market.

Anthem offers Blue Cross Blue Shield plans here in New York and say they simply can't say yet how many people will be affected by this data breach and they still don't know how the hackers were able to get their hands on the ID information they needed to access the database.