Important Notice from Florida Blue

This important notice is to inform certain individuals that we recently learned about a potential exposure of their personal information. On August 30, 2017 we were alerted that an insurance agent, that is not currently affiliated with Florida Blue, electronically stored approximately 475 Florida Blue health, dental and/or life insurance applications on an unsecured cloud-based server. These applications were dated 2009 through 2014 and may contain the following personal information: social security number, date of birth, demographic information, medical history, and limited banking/payment information. Florida Blue is conducting an ongoing investigation into this matter. Through the course of our investigation, we understand the following:

An insurance agency called Real Time Health Quotes, LLC (“RTHQ”) used this cloud based server to back up its agency files, including copies of health, dental and/or life insurance applications. Because the server was unsecured, personal formation on these applications may have been accessible to the public. However, at this time, we are not aware of any illegal or malicious use of this personal information as a result of it being stored on this server. We are also informed that RTHQ took appropriate steps to safeguard this server against unauthorized access once notified of the security vulnerability.

Florida Blue does not have a relationship with RTHQ. We are taking additional steps to determine how RTHQ acquired this application information and why RTHQ stored this information on an unsecured server.

We want to assure those individuals who apply for coverage with Florida Blue that we take our responsibility to safeguard their personal information very seriously. While Florida Blue was not responsible for this incident, we wanted to bring it to the attention of those individuals who were potentially impacted. Within the next few days Florida Blue will send these impacted individuals a notification letter. Out of an abundance of caution, we would also like to assist these impacted individuals in reducing any potential harm associated with this matter by offering them two years of free identity theft protection, detection and resolution services. These services are provided by Experian. Information on how to enroll in this program will be provided in our notification letter to impacted individuals.

If there are any questions regarding this matter please contact our Privacy Office by mail at Florida Blue, 4800 Deerwood Campus Parkway, DC1-7, Jacksonville, FL 32246; by phone at 1-800-477-3736; or by e-mail us at PrivacyOfficial@bcbsfl.com.