Hundreds of congressmen and staff have been found to have had their policies and personally identifiable information (PII) potentially stolen from their insurers.
A correspondent for right-wing news site The Daily Caller revealed the incident by tweeting a screenshot of an email from a possible victim from House Chief Executive Katherine Spindall.
The company in question is DC Health Link, a health insurance marketplace created and managed by the DC Health Benefit Exchange Authority (HBX).
“DC Health Link suffered a major data breach yesterday that potentially exposed the personally identifiable information (PII) of thousands of registrants. Or as an employee, your data may be included.” Spindor wrote.
“While we do not currently know the scale and scope of the breach, we have been notified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that the account information and PII of hundreds of Congressmen and House employees were stolen.”
Szpindor urged affected parties to request a credit freeze from major agencies to prevent threat actors from using stolen information to draw lines of credit in their names.
While it is not believed that members of the House of Representatives were specifically targeted in the attack, it is concerning that a large number of them may have obtained sensitive information from third parties. These details could theoretically be used by hostile states for further espionage and phishing campaigns.
EasyDMARC CEO Gerasim Hovhannisyan warns: In particular, there is a significant risk of a surge in phishing attacks by sophisticated cybercriminals using intelligence gleaned from compromised data. “
One of the threat actors, IntelBroker, has already sold the data, listing 170,000 victims, as part of a trove of data it claims to have stolen from the Health Benefit Exchange Authority.
according to Screenshot posted on Twitterwhich includes home and work emails, home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth, ethnicity, and citizenship status, in addition to countless insurance details.
