in Newswire Published on July 19, 2022

Class Action: Elephant, Apparent Insurance Company Data Breach Exposed Info of More Than 2.7 Million Consumers

Holmes v. Elephant Insurance Company et al.

Filed: July 12, 2022 ◆§ 3:22-cv-00487

Elephant Insurance Company and Apparent Insurance face a class action over a 2022 data breach in which the information of more than 2.7 million consumers was reportedly exposed.

Defendant(s)

Elephant Insurance Company Elephant Insurance Services, LLC Platinum General Agency, Inc. Apparent Insurance

Law(s)

Driver's Privacy Protection Act

State(s)

Virginia

Categories

Privacy Data Breach

Elephant Insurance Company and subsidiary Apparent Insurance face a proposed class action over a March-April 2022 data breach in which the sensitive information of more than 2.7 million consumers was reportedly exposed to unauthorized access.

According to the 29-page complaint, Elephant and Apparent began notifying consumers in June that their computer systems were breached sometime between March 26 and April 1, 2022. The defendants’ data breach notice relayed that the companies identified the incident at some point in April, the suit says.

Per the case, the unencrypted full names, driver’s license numbers and dates of birth of 2,762,687 consumers were exposed in the incident. Victims now face a heightened risk of fraud and identity theft, the suit stresses.

The lawsuit contends that Elephant and Apparent were “not truthful or transparent” in their data breach notice about when they initially discovered the data breach or how it occurred. Moreover, the suit alleges the insurance companies failed to adequately monitor their systems given the “unusual activity” on their networks was not discovered until sometime in April 2022, despite occurring in the previous month.

“Because of the Data Breach, over 2.7 million Class Members’ [sic] suffered ascertainable losses including out-of-pocket expenses and the value of their time incurred to mitigate the effects of the attack and the present and imminent harm caused by the compromise of their sensitive personal information,” the filing says.

According to the complaint, although the cyberattack was foreseeable to Elephant and Apparent given the recent uptick in data breaches within the insurance industry, the companies failed to properly prepare for such.

The lawsuit looks to cover all persons whose personally identifiable information was maintained on Elephant and Apparent’s system and compromised in the data breach, and who were sent notice of the incident.

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