Is your personal data at risk? The third-party payment specialist Almerys was yesterday the victim of a cyberattack compromising the data security of its millions of policyholders. The attack comes only five days after its competitor Viamedis suffered the same setbacks. According to the information provided, the usurpation of identifiers and passwords of “certain healthcare professionals who are customers of the service compromised their accounts and facilitated access” to the Almerys portal “which is dedicated to them”. Personal data of social security holders “was exposed as part of this intrusion,” said Almerys, who could not specify the number of people concerned.
The data in question are the surname, first name, date of birth, birth order (for twins), Social Security number, name of the health insurer, contract number of the insurer and an “internal reference”. Banking information, medical data, health reimbursement details, postal details, telephone numbers and email addresses “are in no way affected by this compromise”, the company clarified.
Almerys has “closed access” to its access portal to healthcare professionals, but with the exception of this portal, its “services are operating normally”. On Thursday, Viamedis, a competitor to Almerys and which manages third-party payment for 20 million social security policyholders, announced that it had been the victim of a cyberattack exposing “limited” data of social security policyholders to intruders.
Viamedis had also disconnected its management platform, without the third-party payment being interrupted for the social security policyholders concerned. Only certain professionals such as opticians and hearing aid specialists were impacted by the closure of the platform.
The majority union of opticians, the ROF (Rassemblement des opticiens de France), asked the two platforms “to do everything possible” to restore the service as quickly as possible. “Given these two incidents in less than a week, the ROF also asks all health platforms for extreme vigilance and increased guarantees in terms of data security,” he added.
