Hackers, data breaches put more Mainers at risk in ‘ongoing chess game’
May 15—As many as 35,086 Mainers may have lost personal information to computer hackers in a data breach reported Friday — and the incident was just one of hundreds that have struck the state in recent months.
PharMerica Corp., a Kentucky-based pharmacy services company, said the hackers stole names, Social Security numbers, insurance information and medication history from the records of 5.8 million people nationwide. In a May 12 letter, the company said it learned March 14 that an “unknown third party” had illicitly accessed the computerized data and that an investigation was underway.
The report came a day after revelations of another data breach, potentially affecting more than 11,000 Maine residents. Brightly Software, a North Carolina subsidiary of industrial conglomerate Siemens, said Thursday that hackers took the names, phone numbers and employer information of roughly 3 million people from a user database.
The theft occurred April 20, and Brightly discovered it April 28, according to the Office of the Maine Attorney General, which maintains a log of data breaches affecting Maine consumers.
Last month, 20,000 Mainers received a notice that hackers had accessed their Social Security numbers, Medicare member numbers and health plan subscriber numbers from the database of NationsBenefits, a health insurance administrator in Florida.
Sometime in early April, a data breach at California-based NextGen Healthcare exposed electronic health records of more than 1 million people, including 3,900 Mainers.
The data disasters affect what may appear to be unlikely targets.
In December, 785 Maine customers of carmaker Nissan were notified their information had been hacked. A ransomware attack and data breach in January hit almost 800 Maine employees and job applicants at Yum! Brands, which owns Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and other fast-food restaurants.
The list of such incidents gets longer each day: More than 300 data breaches affecting Maine residents have been recorded over the last six months by the attorney general’s office. During the same period in 2019-20, at the onset of the pandemic, there were 218 breaches.
Information security experts say cybercrime is not only on…
