The federal government stored sensitive information related to millions of insurance marketplace customers in a data repository with numerous basic security flaws, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG).
The OIG conducted an audit of the Multidimensional Insurance Data Analytics System (MIDAS), which supports the healthcare.gov health insurance exchange website and acts as a central repository for insurance-related data.
HHS uses MIDAS for data analysis and reporting for the Affordable Care Act, but MIDAS is operated by the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) within HHS. The data stored in MIDAS includes a high volume of sensitive consumer information, such as names, Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, financial account information and passport numbers.
THe OIG report also states that CMS was informed of the findings and began remediation efforts immediately.
"CMS reported that it remediated all vulnerabilities and addressed all findings we identified before we issued our final report," the OIG report states.
The OIG conducted an audit of MIDAS from August to December 2014 and examined whether CMS implemented information security controls to secure personally identifiable information (PII). During the audit, the OIG found areas for improvement in CMS’ information security controls, according to the OIG report.
The security weaknesses that auditors found include CMS' failure to disable unnecessary generic accounts in its test environment and CMS also did not encrypt user sessions, the report states. CMS also failed to conduct automated vulnerability assessments that simulate known attacks, which would have revealed vulnerabilities specific to the application or databases that support MIDAS, according to the report.
The OIG audit also found, as a result of vulnerability scans, 135 vulnerabilities, 22 of which were classified as high risk and 62 identified as medium risk.
“We shared with CMS information about our vulnerability scan findings immediately following the scan and informed CMS about other preliminary findings in advance of issuing our draft report. CMS began remediation efforts before the completion of our fieldwork,” the report states.
In a May 2015 letter in response to the audit, which was included in the report, CMS Acting Administrator Andrew Slavitt said “CMS worked with the OIG during the security testing and within a week of the findings being identified, CMS had addressed all the high vulnerabilities identified. CMS had addressed a majority of the remaining findings within 30 days of identification. All of OIG’s findings in this report were addressed by February 2015. In addition, all of the recommendations in this report were fully implemented prior to the draft report being issued.”
