Venyu Blog

It’s happened again: a massive data breach that has placed the private information of more than 500,000 customers at risk of identity theft, or worse.

According to the March 1^st Network World article, on October 2, 2009, 57 hard drives were stolen from a closet at BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee’s training center.  The drives contained recordings of more than 1 million customer support calls, totaling more than 50,000 hours of conversation.  Included on these drives were also 300,000 screen shots, showing what BlueCross representatives had on their computer monitors at the time the calls were made. Since, BlueCross BlueShield has mustered the services of a “small army” of workers – more than 500 full-time workers and 300 part-time employees to MANUALLY examine every screen shot and listen to every minute of every phone conversation, at a cost of more than $7M — and they are not finished. As of January, more than 110,000 hours had been spent reviewing the screen shots and audio logs. To date the company has notified about 300,000 customers of the more than 3 million who may have been affected by the breach.

Did I mention the data on the 57 hard drives was not encrypted?  Or that they could be poached as readily as walking into one of the company’s wire closets?

It doesn’t have to be this way. Online data backup and storage solutions eliminate the possibility of data being compromised onsite. Applying encryption as the backup is occurring eliminates anyone being able to penetrate data for the purposes of identity theft.

To put a spin on the tagline of a national insurance provider, “What’s your [customer data protection] policy?” Consider that question the next time you feel secure in keeping your customer’s (unencrypted) data on-site.  More information here: