Another Hacking in Hollywood?

Reuters/Mario Anzuoni
Reuters/Mario Anzuoni

A number of Hollywood guilds have reached out to members to notify them that their personal information may have been stolen in the recent data breach attack on Anthem.

Anthem provides healthcare coverage plans to the Directors Guild of America (DGA), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), and the Writers Guild of America (WGA), according to Deadline Hollywood, and each of the organizations reached out to members with warnings about the attack.

“On February 4, Anthem, one of the country’s largest providers of health insurance, revealed that the personal information of millions of its customers was the target of a cyberattack,” the DGA wrote in a post on its website. “The DGA-Producer Health Plan contracts with Anthem for use of their provider network… Health Plan participants are not insured by Anthem, so it is not yet known if DGA-PHP participant data was part of the Anthem breach.”

The DGA did make sure to remind their members that “the following information was NOT compromised as part of the cyber attack: credit card information and medical information (such as claims, test results, and diagnostic codes).”

SAG posted a similar message on its own website.

“Last night the Plans discovered, Anthem, who provides the Health Plan with access to their provider network, experienced an IT security breach. An Anthem IT system was compromised and personal information from current and former customers and employees was stolen. We are currently not aware of how many Health Plan participants were affected.”

According to Deadline, WGA issued an email warning to its members rather than posting a message on its website.

“It is possible that the personal information of guild members was accessed by the hackers,” the email noted.

On Thursday, an executive at the information security firm AlienVault told the Los Angeles Times that the Anthem hack is among the biggest security breaches in history.

“If confirmed, we are dealing with one of the biggest data breaches in history and probably the biggest data breach in the healthcare industry,” Jamie Blasco told the Times.

Approximately 80 million people could be affected by the hack.

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