The Central California Alliance for Health, a nonprofit Medicaid health plan, notified 35,883 members of an employee email hacking incident that exposed their information.
On May 7, an unknown third party inappropriately accessed three Alliance employees' email accounts to obtain information of several individuals, according to Merced Sun-Star. The Alliance reported the security breach to HHS on July 2, saying it affected 35,883 people.
After investigating, the health plan, which has more than 330,000 members in Monterey, Merced and Santa Cruz counties, determined that "limited" member health information may have been accessed and that information would not have included financial information or Social Security numbers, according to the publication.
Alliance notified all members affected by the breach, and email accounts of those employees were shut down. All employees were required to change their system password information and complete a training course on email phishing attacks.