Freecycle is an online platform dedicated to helping its users exchange free goods with one another. Freecycle is designed to help reduce waste by helping people give away their unwanted items instead of throwing them away. The platform has more than 7 million users and helps divert huge amounts of waste from landfills each year.
Each week, new data breaches plague the public. This week, significant healthcare and retail breaches led to substantial data losses for customers and patients throughout the United States. With companies like Forever 21, Callaway, and United Healthcare involved, there were serious data losses. Cognizant and Indiana Medicaid were also breached this week. Learn all the details below.
UnitedHealthcare is a large insurance company that serves more than 8 million Americans throughout the United States. The company gathers health, personal, and financial information and utilizes all those different data points to provide reliable insurance services. It's upsetting to learn that UnitedHealthcare was recently attacked and significant data may have been lost.
Cognizant is a massive IT services company with over 300,000 employees and more than $15 Billion in annual revenue. The company helps major corporations with IT services. TMG Health is a healthcare services provider that works with Medicare Advantage, Medicaid Part D, and Managed Medicaid programs for many government agencies throughout the country. Between these two major companies, a huge amount of data is stored. All that data is now vulnerable because of a breach that started in May.
The Indiana Medicaid program helps state residents who fall into a lower income bracket. These individuals use the program to obtain medical care. To qualify for the program, individuals must present their financial statements and other personal data to the government organization. Some or all of this data could be at risk if the organization is compromised. After learning the Medicaid program was compromised, we were concerned about all the individuals that could be impacted.
Forever 21 is a large fashion company that spans across many different countries. Forever 21 has over 540 retail outlets worldwide and approximately 43,000 employees. The organization gathers and uses information from millions of customers, and some of them were exposed in a recent data breach.
Topgolf Callaway is a powerful golf company that offers modern golfing entertainment, as well as selling golf equipment in most areas of the world. The organization maintains online and in-person stores in many different countries and sells to millions of customers annually. With so much customer data exchanging hands through this company and its many retailers, everyone involved is at risk because of a recent security vulnerability.
Mom's Meals is a food service company that helps provide meals to people who are in need of help. This meal service organization works to deliver food to the homes of individuals who need help with food. These individuals could be at risk for identity theft and other serious problems in the future. Learn about the specifics of this breach below and understand the full risk for data loss because of the attack.
Data breaches are becoming more and more of a problem worldwide, and this week, it's especially obvious that they're causing trouble for serious companies. Major medical organizations, schools, and financial companies were all hit by breaches this week. Mom's Meals, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, and Prospect Medical Holdings are all medical companies impacted by breaches this week. TMX Finance and the University of Minnesota are the other targets we cover in the recap below.
Prospect Medical Holdings is an umbrella company with over 16 separate hospitals throughout Pennsylvania, California, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The company manages a huge amount of information between all those different hospitals, and all that data could easily be misused if the wrong individuals accessed it. Prospect Medical Holdings was recently the victim of a data breach, though the company itself did not announce that information to the world.
