(KCPW News) The Utah Department of Health has sent letters to nearly everyone who had their social security number stolen by hackers earlier this month in a massive Medicaid breach. Spokesman Tom Hudachko says 275,000 of the 280,000 people with stolen social security numbers have been informed, and the department is now working to identify those who had less-sensitive information compromised. He says they haven’t been able to definitively correlate anybody who had information taken in the breach with anyone experiencing harm on their credit report.
“We’ve had a number of people who have called and said that prior to receiving a letter they maybe also received a letter from their credit card company or had some unauthorized activity on their credit card,” he says. “There’s background fraud going on out there all the time and it could be a coincidence. What we do want people to know is the information that was compromised did not have any financial information in it.”
Hudachko adds many people who aren’t Medicaid clients are asking why their social security number was stolen. He says it’s normal for health care providers to inquire about patients who don’t have a history with Medicaid.
“And we’re not trying to shift focus or redirect blame on the healthcare provider,” says Hudachko. “They send that information to us with the expectation that the state will keep it safe and that the state will keep it secure. And it was our inability to secure the data that was on our server.”
On April 1, hackers believed to be operating from Eastern Europe broke into a Department of Technology Services computer server and stole the personal information of up to 780,000 people.
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