Weekly Cybersecurity Recap September 1

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. 

TMX Finance

TMX Finance is a crisis loan company. The provider offers emergency loans to individuals throughout the country. tMX was the recent data breach victim, exposing many of its customers to data loss between February 3 and 4, 2023. The breach could lead to serious losses of financial information. If you get a notice about the breach, you may have had your credit card data or bank account information exposed. Monitor your accounts closely and watch to avoid serious problems caused by this breach. 

University of Minnesota

As many as 7 million alumni were recently impacted by a data breach at the University of Minnesota. The school teaches more than 50,000 users annually, and the breach may impact alumni back as far as 1989. This breach is suspected to have impacted over 7 million individuals, and Social Security numbers, names, addresses, and more were lost to it. The breach occurred when one or more individuals broke into the network. If you receive a notice telling you your data was involved, you should get regular credit reports, freeze your credit, and use credit monitoring services to protect yourself. 

Blue Cross of Illinois

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois, the largest insurance provider in the state with over 8.9 patients covered, was recently the victim of a data breach. TMG Health, a vendor for Blue Cross, was breached on June 21, 2023. Serious data, such as birth dates, home addresses, medical data, bank information, Social Security numbers, and emails, were lost to the data breach. The provider sent individual notices out on August 14, 2023, and if you receive one, you should quickly move to secure your information and consider credit monitoring services. 

Prospect Medical Holdings

Prospect Medical Holdings is a parent company that oversees more than 16 different hospitals in Connecticut, California, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. The company was the victim of a data breach on August 3, 2023, and many patients and some staff members lost data to the breach. Personal and medical information was lost, and approximately 1TB of documents and 1.3 TB of SQL database information were taken in this breach. If you use one of the hospitals managed by Prospect, you should check your credit, monitor it closely, and secure your data. 

Mom's Meals

A gang of hackers recently made it public that Mom's Meals was breached and that huge amounts of data were being taken from customers using the service. Mom's Meals is a company that provides food to patients in need at home. Victims of the breach lost Social Security numbers, payment card data, driver's license numbers, diagnosis codes, and much more personal and medical information. The breach began in January and persisted into February. You should secure your information now if you believe your data was taken.