14 DAY TRIAL // The data breach that affected TRICARE in September 2011 turns out to be more serious than initial reports led us to believe. A lot of customers are coming forward to claim that fraudulent charges have been made using their credit cards after the incident occurred.
“Retrieving the data on the tapes requires knowledge of and access to specific hardware and software and knowledge of the system and data structure,” TRICARE representatives reported last year, after a couple of tapes containing sensitive information went missing.
At the time they said that the chances for the data to be misused were minimal, but as experts argued, just because the backup tapes were older models, it didn’t mean that no one could access the information stored on them.
Nextgov informs that some of the 4.9 million individuals whose sensitive information is found on those tapes are reporting unauthorized transactions being made from their bank accounts.
Currently, there are eight separate lawsuits filed over the TRICARE data breach, one of which is coordinated by law firm Shulman, Rogers, Gandal, Pordy & Ecker of Potomac, Md., demanding $4.9 billion (3.67 billion EUR) from the Department of Defense.
A complaint amended to this lawsuit reveals that many plaintiffs had to cancel their credit cards and close their bank accounts after they noticed that their assets were compromised.
It’s now also believed that the theft was targeted. That’s because the car the tapes were stolen from, a 2003 Honda Civic, was surrounded by a number of luxury cars, all of which remained untouched.
“The thief or thieves stealthily broke into the employee's Honda Civic and took the unencrypted backup tapes and records, thereby gaining information worth billions of dollars. The nature of this theft supports the logical inference that the thief or thieves were specifically targeting the confidential information contained on the backup tapes and records,” the complaint reads.