Insurance broker Lyons Companies hit with data breach incident

• The compromised email accounts contained customers’ personal information such as names, dates of birth, contact information, driver's license information, and financial information.
• The accessed information also includes medical and/or clinical information such as medical record numbers, patient identification numbers, diagnosis and treatment information, Medicare or Medicaid identification number, and health insurance and claims information.

Lyons Companies, a leading insurance broker in Delaware, suffered a data breach incident compromising customers’ sensitive information.

What happened?

Lyons became aware of the incident on March 12, 2019. Following this, it hired third-party forensic experts and launched an investigation into the incident.

The investigation revealed that unauthorized third parties gained access to two Lyons employee email accounts. One email account was accessed between February 4 and March 12, 2019, and the second account was accessed for a few hours on March 12, 2019.

What information was compromised?

• The compromised email accounts contained customers’ personal information such as names, dates of birth, contact information, driver's license information, and financial information.
• The accessed information also includes medical and/or clinical information such as medical record numbers, patient identification numbers, diagnosis and treatment information, Medicare or Medicaid identification number, and health insurance and claims information.
• A small percentage of individuals also had their Social Security numbers compromised.

“Lyons receives data from employers in furtherance of the insurance brokerage services it offers. Therefore, once the review of the emails was complete, we worked diligently to determine which employers provided the data and to notify the employers of this incident,” stated Lyons.

What was the response?

• In response to this incident, Lyons has strengthened the security of its systems in order to prevent such incidents from happening in the future.
• The insurance broker is providing the impacted individuals with “Privacy Safeguards” guidelines that may be used to better protect personal information.
• Lyons is also offering free credit monitoring and identity restoration services for all the impacted individuals.

“Lyons Companies ('Lyons') takes the security and privacy of all information that it holds very seriously. While there is currently no evidence that there has been any actual or attempted misuse of information, Lyons is providing notice after an investigation into a data privacy incident,” said the company in its security notice.