Another Security Breach: Health Net of Northeast Inc.

I don’t have anything to add. I’ll only get angrier than I am. This story just speaks for itself.

Health Net says 1.5M medical records lost in data breach

November 19, 2009 (Computerworld) A hard drive with seven years’ worth of personal financial and medical information on about 1.5 million customers of Health Net of the Northeast Inc. was reported missing to state officials yesterday — six months after the drive went missing.

Along with medical records, the hard drive contains names, addresses and Social Security numbers of Health Net customers from Arizona, Connecticut, New Jersey and New York. Connecticut has data breach laws requiring individuals be notified of the loss of their personal data without reasonable delay.

The data loss, which occurred in May, was only reported by the insurance company to the Connecticut state attorney general’s office and the Department of Insurance yesterday. The device containing the data was an external, portable hard drive. The data had not been encrypted.

Health Net, based in Shelton, Conn., had no information about the data breach on its Web site.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said his office is investigating the data breach. “Health Net’s incomprehensible foot-dragging demonstrates shocking disregard for patients’ financial security, as well as loss of their highly sensitive and confidential personal health information,” he said in a statement.

“Shocking disregard” is an understatement. After such things happening AGAIN and AGAIN.. ya just come to the point where you wonder if these companies are doing it on purpose?! I mean, HOW MANY TIMES can companies constantly “lose” very, very important data????

All they are offering people is a free year of credit report checks. Big whoop. There should be a financial disincentive for such security breaches, like $10,000 per customer whose information has been “lost.” I’ll betcha we’d see the government and companies quit fooling around and shape up REAL fast.

Health Net of the Northeast is a subsidiary of managed health care provider Health Net Inc., based in Woodland Hills, Calif. Health Net Inc. is a $15.3 billion company that provides managed medical coverage to some 6.7 million customers in the U.S.

Health Net of the Northeast currently has about 580,000 members and a physician network comprising more than 160,000 doctors, 5,440 pharmacies, and 244 hospitals throughout Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Contest Alert: A New Kitchen!

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Dr. Oetker. All opinions are 100% mine.

The following contest is open to Canadian residents only. (bummer, I know!). So to all my Canadian readers, thank you and all the best in this contest! (Be sure to take photos of your new kitchen, eh?)

There’s a very, very nice contest going on, the Dr. Oetker Kitchen Makeover Contest. It’s very easy and the Grand Prize is $20,000 for a kitchen makeover. Wow! All you have to do is look for the PIN inside the specially-labeled boxes of Savory Splendor’s Casa di Mama Pizza. You go to the game website, login, and click on the Whirlpool oven picture to enter your PIN. You can enter as many PINs as you want until January 4, 2010. Be sure to see the rules and regulations at the website.

There’s the option to become a Savoury Moments Member and get a bonus PIN, too! Plus there’s the Dr. Oetker Newsletter that sends you tips, news, meal ideas, and information on special deals and savings too.

$20,000 for a kitchen makeover is a fantastic prize. I sure need one! The other prizes are very nice, too; secondary winners will get one of eight beautiful Whirlpool appliances: a freestanding electric range stove; a Whirlpool dishwasher (wowwww); a very nice Whirlpool refrigerator/freezer; or a microwave. And other prizes include 2,000 delicious Casa di Mama Pizza giveaways, or a pizza cutter.

Remember, this contest is for Canadian residents only, and ends January 4th. So get your PINs ready- you could win a new kitchen!

Banks Are Just BEGGING For Identity Theft

WHAT a disgusting disgrace! Bank Sends Sensitive E-mail to Wrong Gmail Address, Sues Google.

A Wyoming bank sent an e-mail containing sensitive customer data to the wrong Gmail account, and now wants Google to reveal the identity of the account holder who received the data.

According to a court document in the case, in August a customer of the Rocky Mountain Bank asked a bank employee to send certain loan statements to a representative of the customer. The employee, however, inadvertently sent the e-mail to the wrong Gmail address. Additionally, the employee had attached a sensitive file to the e-mail that should not have been sent at all.

The attachment contained confidential information on 1,325 individual and business customers that included their names, addresses, tax identification or Social Security numbers and loan information.

After realizing what he’d done, the employee “tried to recall the e-mail without success.”

When that didn’t work, the employee sent a second e-mail to the recipient instructing the person to delete the e-mail and attachment “in its entirety” without opening or reviewing it. The employee also asked the recipient to contact the employee to “discuss his or her actions.”

Silence ensued.

That’s when the bank sued Google to identify the recalcitrant recipient.

I am NO fan of Google, but if this bank thinks that suing Google for the identity of the email recipient is going to solve anything, they are nutso.

Let me get this straight: the employee EMAILED all this sensitive information?! :-O

Do you have any idea how many hands an email passes through to get to the recipient? Emails are NOT secure, not at all. I am appalled that Social Security numbers and bank account numbers are strewn across the Internet and FAX machines. Are the banks just BEGGING to be stolen from? I know that banks (and government bureaus) do this stuff all the time. So what! So the bank employee sent it to the wrong person. He never should have sent it AT ALL.

Do Your Homework When Looking for Web Hosting

I’ve had my share of web hosts, some good and some not so good. Before leaping into the world of self-hosting your own websites, you really need to evaluate your needs (which might grow over time). Most bloggers choose shared hosting, which is your website hosted on a server along with a number of other people’s websites on the same server. Then there is dedicated hosting, which is your own dedicated server, or partition on a server; or a middle-ground kind of hosting called vps hosting. Dedicated hosting is usually much, much more stable and reliable, but it is also extremely expensive. VPS hosting is more affordable and offers many of the perks that dedicated hosting offers; shared hosting is the least expensive and the least reliable.

It’s this kind of stuff that you need to know before taking the leap. I didn’t know a lot of stuff, so I wandered around, wasting a lot of time, energy, and effort. I did learn a lot in the process, but I would have rather avoided some of the snarls of ignorance.

Here’s a good site to get your feet wet with web hosting: WebHostingGeeks.com. This site has been up and running since 2004, providing the Internet with excellent and readable articles, tips, and reviews of web hosting terms, concepts, and providers. The Web Hosting 101 series is excellent; I go there sometimes to keep up with latest developments and news, and read reviews of some newer hosting companies. WebHostingGeeks also has tips on SEO and SEM strategies, informative articles on domain names (and ICANN has recently internationalized the Internet, so the structure of domain names will soon be changing), and more. It’s a good site to check from time to time, looking at news and reviews. I like the consumer reviews of the various web hosts, too. WebHostingGeeks breaks them down into “Best Dedicated Hosting,” “Best UNIX Hosting,” Best Email Hosting,” “Best Budget Hosting,” and more.

Before taking the plunge to have your websites hosted, be sure to learn a little of the trade. You will avoid a lot of headaches, and you’ll also get the most for your money. Be sure to take a look at WebHostingGeeks.com. It’s totally free to peruse, and you will learn a lot!

Finally! Free File Compression Software

There are SO many super free software programs out there. I am amazed that some of them are free, because they are so good, like OpenOffice, Gimp, Irfanview, Comodo, and others. But for years, file compression software is NOT free. WinZip has held the line at #1, for some od reason– because it is not free! And after the evaluation period, there’s a nag screen that never goes away! I don’t think WinZip is so hot that I need to pay $40 for it…. I mean, file compression?! Who uses that stuff every day?

Then there was WinRAR. I downloaded it free on a computer a couple of years ago. But it looks like WinRAR is no longer free (and I found it hard to use). :-p This is simple file compression software we’re talking about. I could never understand why the amazing stuff like OpenOffice or ? was free, and WinZIp and WinRAR were not.

Ah! But I have JUST discovered some FREE file compression software! Donwload.com featured it– it’s 7-zip. It’s very, very basic– no bells and whistles here. But it work with all Windows operating systems, and it’s free! I don’t need fancy fil compression siftware program– just something simple that does the job when I have a job to be done. It’s free, it’s good. Check it out if you want.

Blitzing Fast Internet Speeds WIth Charter Ultra60

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Charter. All opinions are 100% mine.

I watched a documentary about the history of Apple Computers; it was fascinating. The best part of all, I thought, was the comparison of the Internet of 15 years ago, and the Internet of today. Holy cow, the Internet used to CRAAAAWL through the wiring back then, eh? So much has changed, and we are connected to the Internet is so many ways that were unthinkable back then. We use our computers for the kids’ education, but also for word processing, financial management, and especially now– for our entertainment. I am a real sucker for LOL Cats videos! And we create and upload a lot of videos we’ve made, share photos, listen to music, and stream movies.

It doesn’t seem that too many Internet Service Providers are keeping pace with the online demands of their consumers. Some companies are, like Charter. I’ve been watching this company for over a year now (I can’t wait until we can get service in my area); Charter has consistently listened to its customers by offering their superior service and speed. They’ve also had some very nice giveaways, too.

The latest Charter development is the Charter Ultra Fast 60, a blitzing-fast connection– one of the fastest in the U.S. It had it’s beginning in St. Louis where it was wildly successful (no surprise there), had spread to Southern California, and is FINALLY coming to the Northeast in the near future; Charter hopes to cover its own areas with this new “phatband” technology by 2010! It promises speeds up to 60 Mbps, a nice wide-open pike for sending and receiving huge files, watching movies, gaming, and more. Sweet!

You can go to the Charter website to check out the new Charter Ultra Fast 60 service, look around, see what’s new. I like Charter. I have heard only good reviews about them, and they really seem to be attuned to the customer.

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