In January of 2014, an administrator at health insurer, Anthem noticed a very large and unusual query running on their network. Although it appeared as though a colleague was responsible for this query, further investigation revealed it was coming from elsewhere.
Within minutes of noticing this query, Anthem was on full alert. Apparently, the hackers in question used a phishing email to lure an employee to give up their credentials, unwarranted. Using these credentials, the hackers were able to obtain social security numbers and birth dates of more than 78 million people in the database – all stemming back to 2004 records.
The hack alone has cost Anthem near $230 million in legal and consultant fees. Not to mention, they are now at fault for not having the right protections in place to minimize the threat of cyber-attacks and had ignored alerts which could end up costing them even more in the long-run.
One way to guard against the threat of stolen data is to utilize secure hard drive destruction services. AccuShred firmly believes that total physical destruction is the only fail-safe method of destroying data stored on hard drives, disks and other storage devices. That is why we shred and recycle each and every hard drive that we receive. We NEVER sell intact hard drives – period.