Over the weekend of Oct. 2nd, unauthorized persons entered a data closet in a remote location that BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee leases for training purposes, the Eastgate Town Center in Chattanooga. They removed some computer equipment, including small hard drives containing encoded data.

BlueCross is working closely with local and federal authorities. Based on what we know so far in this investigation, the stolen computer equipment contained voice recordings of eligibility and coordination-of-benefit calls used for training purposes. The retrieval of member data from these drives would require highly-specialized expertise and software; therefore, at the present time, we have no reason to believe that member data has been accessed.

Reports that a burglar alarm went off Friday evening at the Eastgate Town Center location are inaccurate. On Friday evening Oct. 2nd, our computer monitoring systems generated a notice that there was an issue with the servers in the data closet. This electronic notice only indicated that the servers were not functioning properly, not that there had been a theft from the server room. As these servers were not critical to our operations during the weekend, we did not dispatch an employee until Monday morning. On Monday morning an information systems employee went to physically service the equipment only to discover then that the disk drives had been stolen. 

BlueCross takes the security of our members’ health information seriously. If we discover that any members’ personal information has been compromised, we will reach out directly to notify those members as soon as possible. We have a team working diligently to determine what personal information, if any, has been accessed.

As details become available, BlueCross will update this Web site.