Washington, DC, health insurance exchange admin apologizes to House members for data breach

A top administrator of Washington’s District of Columbia Health Benefit Exchange Authority apologized for a data breach that released personal information on members of the Congress.

She said a server was incorrectly configured in mid-2018 when they installed the internal communications program Slack. That faulty configuration allowed an unauthorized individual to access the server and steal two reports containing personal information of "56,415 current and past customers including members of Congress, their families, and staff."

Some of that information was later offered up for sale in an online forum. The issue first came to public attention when members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were informed that they and their staffers may have been affected.