Insurance company Aetna has contacted 65,000 current and former employees whose Social Security numbers (SSNs) may have been compromised in a Web site data breach.
The job application Web site also held names, phone numbers, e-mail and mailing addresses for up to 450,000 applicants, Aetna spokeswoman Cynthia Michener said. SSNs for those people were not stored on the site, which was maintained by an external vendor.
The company found out about the breach earlier this month when people began receiving spam messages that appeared to come from Aetna and complained to the company, Michener said. The spam purported to be a response to a job inquiry and requested more personal information.
The spam campaign showed the intruders successfully harvested e-mail addresses from the Web site, although Michener said it's not clear if SSNs were also obtained.
Nonetheless, Aetna sent letters last week notifying the 65,000 people whose SSNs were on the site of the breach. The company is offering them one year of free credit monitoring, as SSNs are often used by identity thieves.
"We wanted to err on the side of caution," Michener said.
Aetna hired an IT forensics company to investigate how the Web site had been compromised. "At this point despite a thorough review, they've not been able to pinpoint the precise breach," Michener said.
Aetna posted alerts on the job site, its main Web site and its internal intranet about the spam campaign, Michener said.
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Comments (5)
Who was the outside vendor?By Anonymous on May 28, 2009, 1:45 pmSince their job application is using technology from Taleo, I sure hope they aren't the outside vendor. Taleo powers a lot of career sites.
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TaleoBy Anonymous on May 29, 2009, 1:59 pmOUCH - I wonder if other companies have been affected
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TaleoBy Anonymous on May 29, 2009, 4:45 pmTaleo is their job application Web site.
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Taleo TroubleBy Anonymous on May 29, 2009, 10:41 pmWow...First the SEC forces them to restate their revenues, then they post a loss for Q1, now it looks like Taleo got hacked and they compromised one of their largest...
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So much for Quality????By Anonymous on June 2, 2009, 5:12 pmAs a former employee of Aetna, who quit due to the stress associated with a CSR and related performance expectations in a 98-100% range. All calls were recorded...
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