This was not from a healthcare company, but rather a life insurance company in Texas. The fact of the matter here is that there’s enough in there for thieves to make a sale, and another and another. The story mentions the TOR browser and if you don’t know what it is,
it’s a fork of Firefox that allows form anonymous browsing and actually the only way the Evolution Market can be browsed. Tor is a legal browser and government agencies, reporters, etc. all use it and it’s just like anything else out there used for the good or the bad.
What’s interesting here is the terminology the author tells us about as this is something new for me to be reading about. So now if you hear the word “fullz” you know the street slang here means it’s a load file of all kinds of personal and financial records. All purchases are done via bitcoin which is kind of bad as it give bitcoin a bit of a bad association. You can read the article below and see the more you buy, the better the price break too.
By the time this information was related the government had just begun working on the problem. The dates on the postings and files seemed to indicate the records had been on sale for around 3 months. One of the victims now is also complaining about the numerous calls she’s now getting over and over about the theft and saying the notification calls are a bit over done too. As Dr. Halamka at Harvard recently said, it’s become a war keeping patient medical records secure from hackers.
It’s Become A war To Keep Patient Medical Records Secure And Out of the Hands of Hackers, Data Selling Epidemic in the US Fuels This Fire…
One of the comments in this article too was very astute in asking “I tend to wonder how many “legitimate” companies are buying these data.” That comes right back around to the need to license all data sellers in the US. Let’s revisit the Game Data Dealer here just for the heck of it..they do a good job with dramatics to get your attention. BD
Two Data Brokers Get Fined by the FTC For Non Compliance, One Gets Most All Of The Million Dollar Fine Reduced as They Could Not Afford To Pay By the Court, But If You Are A Consumer With Medical Bills You Go To Bankruptcy Court..
How much are your medical records worth in the cybercrime underground? This week, KrebsOnSecurity discovered medical records being sold in bulk for as little as $6.40 apiece. The digital documents, several of which were obtained by sources working with this publication, were apparently stolen from a Texas-based life insurance company that now says it is working with federal authorities on an investigation into a possible data breach.
Purloined medical records are among the many illicit goods for sale on the Evolution Market, a black market bazaar that traffics mostly in narcotics and fraud-related goods — including plenty of stolen financial data. Evolution cannot be reached from the regular
Internet. Rather, visitors can only browse the site using Tor, software that helps users disguise their identity by bouncing their traffic between different servers, and by encrypting that traffic at every hop along the way.
Last week, a reader alerted this author to a merchant on Evolution Market nicknamed “ImperialRussia” who was advertising medical records for sale. ImperialRussia was hawking his goods as “fullz” — street slang for a package of all the personal and financial records that thieves would need to fraudulently open up new lines of credit in a person’s name.
Each document for sale by this seller includes the would-be identity theft victim’s name, their medical history, address, phone and driver license number, Social Security number, date of birth, bank name, routing number and checking/savings account number. Customers can purchase the records using the digital currency Bitcoin.
A set of five fullz retails for $40 ($8 per record). Buy 20 fullz and the price drops to $7 per record. Purchase 50 or more fullz, and the per record cost falls to just $6.40 — roughly the price of a value meal at a fast food restaurant. Incidentally, even at $8 per record, that’s cheaper than the price most stolen credit cards fetch on the underground markets.
“Live and Exclusive database of US FULLZ from an insurance company, particularly from NorthWestern region of U.S.,” ImperialRussia’s ad on Evolution enthuses. The pitch continues:
“Most of the fullz come with EXTRA FREEBIES inside as additional policyholders. All of the information is accurate and confirmed. Clients are from an insurance company database with GOOD to EXCELLENT credit score! I, myself was able to apply for credit cards valued from $2,000 – $10,000 with my fullz. Info can be used to apply for loans, credit cards, lines of credit, bank withdrawal, assume identity, account takeover.”
Sure enough, the source who alerted me to this listing had obtained numerous fullz from this seller. All of them contained the personal and financial information on people in the Northwest United States (mostly in Washington state) who’d applied for life insurance through American Income Life, an insurance firm based in Waco, Texas.
American Income Life referred all calls to the company’s parent firm — Torchmark Corp., an insurance holding company in McKinney, Texas. This publication shared with Torchmark the records obtained from Imperial Russia. In response, Michael Majors, vice president of investor relations at Torchmark, said that the FBI and Secret Service were assisting the company in an ongoing investigation, and that Torchmark expected to begin the process of notifying affected consumers this week.
More than 1.8 million people were victims of medical ID theft in 2013, according to a report from the Ponemon Institute, an independent research group. I suspect that many of these folks had their medical records stolen and used to open new lines of credit in their names, or to conduct tax refund fraud with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Advantage patients, some of which have already had their primary doctors fired. If you read the link below you can see where United is working to match patients up with new doctors but the algorithms are doing funny things and giving patients OBGYNs and Neurosurgeons as their new primary care MDs. 
will be out of network on Oct. 1. Erlanger has the area’s only children’s hospital.
Cedars already have a few things going together like this Venture Capital fund created a few months ago. 
seeing cancer patients where they agree to use the Blue Cross methods of recommended treatment. Anthem Blue Cross is a licensed reseller of IBM Watson and a couple years ago pretty much foot the bill for the use at Cedars to get it started. 
programs was one of his projects. He was a banker before Kaiser and worked at Capitol One and JP Morgan in IT. 
when every tiny change is made, it’s too much anymore based on contracts that change at the drop of a a business intelligence algorithm. That’s what’s going on. At United we have the “secret scoring” where they are being fired and given no reason why, so you know it’s an algorithm making that decision.
Medicare Advantage in the fact that this contract covered 5,000 employees of the Business Health Group. I might make a guess and say that price had something to do with this as just common sense Humana might not be able to compete here. I say “too big to fail here” as that’s what’s happening with one insurer outsizing the rest in the country and having 15 pages of subsidiary companies at the SEC listed, although you might not see that today as many have been now absorbed by the Optum division, but they are still there along with the huge number of government contracts United has by comparison to the other major insurers in the US. United makes 1/3 of their profits from software, consulting and things outside selling policies today, and that’s the other 2/3rd of the business. 
and episodes of care, including Symmetry Episode Treatment Groups® (ETG®), Symmetry Procedure Episode Groups® (PEG®), Symmetry Episode Risk Groups® (ERGs®), Symmetry EBM Connect® and 3MTM All Patient Refined Diagnosis Related Groups (APR DRG).”
Actually if you wait long enough the internet with all the flawed data out there today will end up in time giving you some kind of diagnosis:)
ook forward to more data selling, more expense with non relevant data being used and of course we pay for all of this as well. Because of all the money spent creating queries and software though, it’s going to be forced upon us to go against the grain of the “real” world and buy in to all of this and we will continue to see one failure after another as our society gets angrier as with time and more failed models, the Algo Duping becomes more apparent. I’m not saying it’s all bad by any means and there’s some really neat stuff going on as well but so much of it gets back burnered anymore as the “junk” hops out in front. I used to write software and thus I have some real admirations for talented people who do create great solutions too, but again that’s not what makes top line news today. 
for paying data mining members to use for research, painstakingly looking for information about their drugs or products, in the case of Merck and Boston Scientific or other entities wanting to research for particular conditions, diseases, etc. When the labs first opened they explained there were two kinds of memberships and the hospitals, such as Mayo are “owners” which means they have an opportunity here to maybe make some money along the way. 
member which is located in Minnesota.
These are more of the data novices that really get caught up in all of this as someone selling software can really hype you up on the fact that you need it and thus with that type goes the hacker hype and interest too.
Time will tell how long it takes this time before the two come to terms. Stanford Medical is also in the process of trying to save a small hospital system from going out of business and is talking to acquire them. Nobody likes to talk about “hospital inequality” to include CMS but it’s there slapping you in the face every day. Anyway if patients continue to go there they will be considered out of network now if they have Blue Cross Anthem insurance and it will cost more. They say Stanford is one of the most expensive hospitals in the state but heck they need the money to bail out these other hospitals right now, right? 
with Tenet for a long time and the obvious would be to keep those doctors for less disruption in care. What the pay cuts maybe for those doctors is not yet known.
insurer in the face with the allegations of pay for performance measures as it is stated they created an incentive to staff to admit and retain ineligible patients by giving out bonuses and other incentives based up on meeting their targets. It’s also beginning to sound like the same stat rats at the VA as well, who were so stuck on numbers they could not make a left turn to save a life. The bonuses (or as sometimes called P4P) were for staff members who admitted, certified and recertified and discharging patients. 
Outreach who’s duty was to troll nursing homes, hospitals and other care facilities to obtain new clients. Now sales portions take place everywhere and nothing wrong with sales people, and they received commissions on the news of new admissions. I can’t see a problem there but as long as the sales calls were good will calls and not looking for ineligible patients. 
and maybe something unexpected popped up in that area as the note does reference the hospital wants to be a “safe” facility. In addition the hospital has also had financial issues in struggling to pay both employees and vendors in the last 3-4 years. Who knows, maybe they need a loan to fix the boiler? RKM Management is the owner of the hospital. The ER room is closed and the next closest facility is 24 miles away which concerns residents. 
and thus there’s the tug and pull and if it is subsidiary of an insurance company, there’s a lot of a revenue stream with the audits. 
decisions and I would imagine there could be quite a few takers on this as it represents one less headache of bean counters in the virtual/real world confusion we live in today which I call “The Grays”, a very big problem indeed. 
he can’t see his doctor anymore as they don’t see any Covered California patients. That is frustrating and this might go back to the mess with doctors getting paid 30% less from Blue Cross and Blue Shield with policies bought through the exchange. It was so bad for a while that the insurers had to go back and up the reimbursement a bit and still the lists of who was in network and who was not was still a mess. 
Blue Shield showed that we were discounted some 20-30% of our previously paid services and the check was now going to the patient and not the provider. We have been trying to get these checks from the patients who love getting these Blue Shield checks and keeping them. As physicians are finding this out they are mad and are starting to demand payment up front from the patient and give them a superbill so they can bill Blue Shield. What a mess.”
