Another Texas State Agency Reporting Data Breach
DADS reports personal information of 6,600 Medicaid patients exposed….
Another Texas state agency is reporting a data breach. The Department of Aging and Disability Services (DADS) said Thursday in a news release that it is contacting more than 6,600 Medicaid patients about the “unintentional” exposure of its records to the public for up to eight years on the Internet.
Officials with the agency said the breach was discovered in April and the information exposed via a Web application meant for internal use only was taken down off the Internet. Information exposed included Social Security and Medicaid numbers, medical diagnoses, treatment information and personal information such as names and addresses.
DADS is partnering with an identity protection firm to offer one year of free credit protection and identity restoration services for affected clients. Officials say the agency has strengthened its policies, procedures and Web-application security to help prevent such a breach from occurring again.
In 2011, the office of the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts suffered a data breach in which personal data of some 3.5 million people was exposed on a public computer server. In that incident, Social Security numbers and other personal information were left exposed on a computer at the agency for more than a year.
The Comptroller’s Office also offered free credit monitoring for one year to those 3.5 million people, most of whom were current and retired state employees and teachers as well as individuals with information under the control of the Texas Workforce Commission.
This story originally published in Texas Government Insider Newsletter, which is published by Strategic Partnerships Inc. and is printed here with full permission.