Health Insurer Anthem Didn’t Encrypt Data in Theft
Companies Aren’t Required by Law to Scramble Records, and Often Don’t
Anthem Inc. stored the Social Security numbers of 80 million customers without encrypting them, the result of what a person familiar with the matter described as a difficult balancing act between protecting the information and making it useful.
Scrambling the data, which included addresses and phone numbers, could have made it less valuable to hackers or harder to access in bulk. It also would have made it harder for Anthem...