Millions of social security numbers exposed in Montana health security breach

Official on Tuesday announced that the month of May the Montana Health services suffered a security breach, which has resulted in the theft of social security numbers and other important personal information such, as bank accounts, of 1.3 million people. The statement from the officials, however, gave no clear facts about the extent of damage the service suffered.

Hackers compromised one of the servers connected to Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, and stole the data that was lying in their database. Officials said that they still investigating about the origin of those malicious hackers who stole the credentials.

'There is no information, no indication, that the hackers really accessed any of this information or used it inappropriately,' said Richard Opper, director of the state Department of Public Health and Human Services. 'We are erring on the side of displaying an overabundance of caution.'

Officials said that they has now strengthen the security, but since the stolen data can be misused, the state is now offering a free one year credit card monitoring and identity theft fraud insurance. People who live in Montana are being notified about the breach and also to those who left the state. However, the good news here is that none of them made a call to report identity theft.

The breach was discovered when some of the employees responsible for maintaining the server detected a suspicious activity being carried out in the systems. Employees discovered that the malware was residing in the network to steal the information for the malicious hackers.

'There are 17,000 unauthorized attempts to enter the state computer system every hour on average, or about six billion attempts per year. With that volume, it's difficult to ensure the state's computer security is a step ahead of the hackers' technology,' Opper said.