In March 2015, Primera Blue Cross in Washington State ( premera.com ) was victim

Question

In March 2015, Primera Blue Cross in Washington State (premera.com) was victim of a cyberattack where 11 million customers were affected. Hackers were able to penetrate the system on May 5, 2014 but it was not discovered until January 29, 2015. Sensitive data like SSN, DOB, email address and other account information was compromised.

Here are a couple of links with some information about the incident.
http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/03/premera-blue-cross-breach-exposes-financial-medical-records/ 
https://www.premera.com/wa/visitor/about-the-cyberattack/?WT.z_redirect=www.premera.com/cyberattack/

Prepare a report that covers following:

Explain the background details about the organization and the nature of the attack or crime that occurred.

Analyze and describe details regarding the impact of the attack or crime to include financial losses, number of individuals affected, and the effect on the reputation of the organization.

Analyze the organization’s incident response and whether or not the incident was handled in an appropriate manner.

Your report should be two to three pages in length.

Explanation / Answer

Premera Blue cross -cyber attack:

On the year 2015, the Premera agency came to know that their company confidential informations are hacked by cyber attackers by gaining a unauthorized login access to their Information system. Actually the attack has been intiated on May 5, 2014.

To investigate the situation and remove the cyber infection, the company reaches the help of Mandiant(leading cybersecurity firm).

The attackers targeted over Premera Blue cross and their affiliate brands. Also few other channels like Vivacity , Connexion Insurance too have be attacked. The attackers mainly focused on confidential informations like Name, email id,Address, SSN, ID number, bank accounts details, along with the clinical informations.

The attack also got extented upto their clients, who are all doing business with Premera, but still now there is no any complaint of misuse of the information gained by the attackers.

Impact of Premera attack:

By detailed analysis over the cyber attack, Premera confirmed that there was around 11 million users information has been compromised.Comparatively it was second larget cyber attack in health care industr, where Anthem - cyber attack got more number of users information has been compromised(approximately 78 million).

Since Security of information are the key point for product success, people lost trust on Premera. To withstand their standard, Premera offers

                   1. Two years free credit monitoring
                   2. Identity theft protection.

Premera offers this service to all the customers to gain people base again to their platform. Also the CEO of the firm
Jeff Roe, states that investigation over the attack was in process along with cybersecurirty firms and FBI. Also FireEye service has been used to correct the infected software.

However, the company have not provided any information over the financial loss due to this cyber attack.

How Premera handled the attack:

The attack was completely unknown to the company for more than six months, where the security system of the firm was questioned here. However once the attack has came to light, Premera get on the ground immediately to correct those issues, with the help of FBI and other Cyber Security team.

Also premera apologized to customer, along with that they stated the facts that no information yet have been misused. That news gave the people little relief. Also compensated the customers with few perks like free monitory and info theft protection for the user information.

Later the security standards of Premera have revised more tighter than before.

Since we are living the world of digital, attackers may take various form to break the security, it was the duty of the firms to update the security policies regularly to prevent from this kind of attack.

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