75,000 Affected by WellPoint Data Loss

WellPoint, a health insurance company that handles coverage for Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield disclosed Wednesday that a CD containing medical records and other personal data may have been lost.

Approximately 75,000 members of the insurer have been affected after a company called Magellan Behavioral Services had apparently lost the disc, the New York Times reports.

Those affected are now being alerted to the problem, and are being offered a year's worth of free credit monitoring through Equifax. Lost information included names, social security numbers, and health information.

Magellan was coordinating the insurer's mental and behavioral health services, the paper said. The CD contained information that had been stripped of the normal encryption algorithms normally used to protect data.

It is not yet known whether the disc has been lost or stolen, although evidence indicates it was most likely lost. Empire is working with those involved as well as UPS, the shipping carrier for the disc, in an attempt to locate it.

This was not the first incident of data loss for WellPoint: in October 2006, the company had data backup tapes holding data on 196,000 members of Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and Virginia stolen.