At least 1.4 million Americans have had their personal information exposed in a data breach that struck the Allianz Life Insurance Company of North America on July 16th. The hackers accessed customer data through a third-party, cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform using social engineering techniques to break in, which is exactly how a string of similar data breaches affected other healthcare and insurance companies occurred.
Allianz discovered the breach on July 17, and according to reporting from Fox News, “took immediate action to contain and mitigate the issue,” including notifying federal law enforcement and the FBI. The breach does appear to have been limited to the U.S. branch of the company, and there does not appear to be any evidence that the Allianz Life network or any other company systems were accessed.
