14 DAY TRIAL // Centene Corporation, a US-based health insurer and a Fortune 500 company, announced two days ago that it lost six hard drives that contained the personal information of around 950,000 patients.
"Centene takes the privacy and security of our members' information seriously," said Michael F. Neidorff, Chairman, President and CEO of Centene. "While we don't believe this information has been used inappropriately, out of abundance of caution and in transparency, we are disclosing an ongoing search for the hard drives."
Mr. Neidorff explained that these hard drives were used at one of its laboratories and that they've been storing information for patients that were clients of Centene's services between 2009 and 2015.
The company did not reveal when the hard drives went missing, but it unveiled what they contained.
Centene said that standard data recorded at the affected laboratory included details such as the patient's name, address, date of birth, social security number, member ID number, and health information.
No financial or payment information was lost
The company did not store financial information on those hard drives, but Centene has announced it will be providing a free year of credit and healthcare monitoring services for all affected users.
The company also started an audit of its IT asset management procedures.
As expected, as soon as the announcement hit the Internet, Centene stock plummeted 2% from $62.02, hitting $59.15 the next day at its lowest point. Stock is now back at $62.15. If financial information was lost, or the data breach affected more people, then the incident would have had more long-lasting financial consequences for Centene's shareholders.
With data breaches becoming a common occurrence these days, companies are starting to understand the economic costs that associate each of these incidents. This is why in recent months data breaches have started having a bigger reverberation on the stock market as well.