After a recent vulnerability in government systems was exploited, black market vendors gained access to a large variety of personal Medicare details.
Dubbing the illegal business “The Medicare Machine”, authorities just recently made the breach public earlier today (July 4th, 2017) after several victims came forward; admitting to purchasing their own Medicare details off the dark web in hopes of avoiding long-term consequence.
“It follow revelations a Guardian Australia journalist was able to buy their own Medicare details from a darknet trader who is illegally selling the information by “exploiting a vulnerability” in a government system.”
The Medicare details are being divided by customer name and sold for $3 a pop. Although the leak doesn’t contain personal health records, it does include Medicare card numbers – which is just as concerning.
With just the card number, an attacker can easily create a fake card and commit identity fraud. In addition to that, the cards could also be used as identification to buy products or drugs.
The biggest problem is that this threat is nothing unexpected.
“This is not a new problem for the Government. In 2015, Senate estimates heard details of 369 cases of Medicare identity theft over two years, prompting the creation of a police strike force to investigate sham payments.”
In response to the data breach, officials are urged to tighten the security around government servers to prevent a similar attack from happening. Although: something else will most likely still happen. We live in a world of cyber security threats and hacktivities.
Officials claim they are monitoring the dark web heavily for sensitive data breaches like this one, but several online users question their security’s authenticity. If the dark web really is being heavily monitored, some speculate on why so many cyber-attacks are still being executed as a result of dark web services.