Delta Dental notifies members possibly affected by 2018 phishing

Delta Dental is largest and main dental plan system of the United States, having 39 member companies. Recently, Delta Dental of Illinois revealed a security incident that has affected an undisclosed number of its insured members as well as dependents. Illinois is a state in the mid-west bordering Mississippi River in west and the Indiana in east.

As per the officials, certain employees have received phishing emails from a hacker who tries to acquire their login credentials. The phishing attack takes place in the month of December of last year (i.e. 2018). The Illinois-based Delta Dental recently figured out that one of their employees had become victim to this phishing attack of last year, as per the notification signed by CEO of Delta Dental.

As a result, this attacker has gain access to the compromised employee's email account in between December 21, 2018, and December 28, 2018 (i.e. for a week). That compromised email account contains some members' PHI (Protected Health Information) like name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, and vision or dental insurance data.

However, the notice by Delta Dental of Illinois didn't explain when this breach was discovered first. The officials of Illinois-based Delta Dental retained a third-party computer forensics company in order to investigate this security incident and determine scope of this phishing attack, as well as find whether any kind of Protected Health Information in the compromised employee's email account was actually accessed. In this security incident, the third-party computer forensics company investigation was inconclusive to suggest whether any kind of PHI in the compromised employee's email account was accessed.

So the Illinois-based Delta Dental is notifying those possibly affected by the data breach. In addition, Delta Dental is also offering those possibly affected individuals 365 days of free credit monitoring protection.

Further, the dental insurer has also reset all the employee email account passwords as well as added the email security tools to their system. It is currently not known how many patients got impacted by this breach, as it is still not posted on breach reporting tool of Department of Health and Human Services'.

» SPAMfighter News - 5/13/2019