The Texas Department of Insurance recently disclosed a “data security event” that appears to have affected roughly 1.8 million people.
The Texas Department of Insurance (TDI) disclosed the incident on March 24, but DataBreaches.net noticed that the Texas Attorney General’s office reported on April 4 that 1.8 million Texans are impacted.
The exposed information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of births, and partial or full social security numbers, as well as information about injuries and worker compensation claims.
TDI has not shared too many details, but the incident does not appear to involve a breach by a third party. Based on its brief description, a critical vulnerability exposing user data was discovered in one of its web applications.
TDI said it became aware of a security issue affecting one of its web applications on January 4. The affected app is used to manage workers’ compensation information.
“We found the issue was due to programming code that allowed internet access to a protected area of the application,” the organization said.
The application was temporarily shut down after the security flaw was discovered and it was brought back online after the issue was fixed.
It’s unclear for how long the data was exposed, but TDI claims that a forensics company searched the internet for the exposed information and it has found no evidence of misuse.
Nevertheless, affected individuals are being offered free credit monitoring and identity theft protection services for 12 months. TDI is notifying individuals who made new compensation claims between March 2019 and January 2022, but others who made claims since 2006 may also qualify for the credit monitoring service.
It’s possible that the vulnerability was reported to TDI by a cybersecurity researcher and that they will publicly disclose their findings in the upcoming period.
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