Breach filing
ArchivedExcellus Health Plan, Inc.: 9,358,891 individuals, Sep 2015.
Excellus Health Plan, Inc. reported a breach of unsecured protected health information to the HHS Office for Civil Rights on 9 September 2015. The filing records the organisation as a health plan in New York and lists 9,358,891 individuals affected, which makes it the 1st largest of the 511 New York filings on the register and the 3rd largest of the 270 filings submitted nationally in 2015. Among the 23 New York filings made in 2015 it ranks 1st.
Individuals affected
9,358,891
As reported to HHS
Modelled cost (IBM 2025)
$1.50B
Upper bound, method shown
Rank in NY
1st
of 511 New York filings
Rank in 2015
3rd
of 270 filings nationally
Section F.1 / The filing
As posted by HHS OCR
Every value below is the portal's own field for this filing, plus its rank within the register.
- Covered entity type
- Health Plan
- Individuals affected
- 9,358,891
- Breach submission date
- 9 September 2015
- Submission year
- 2015
- Type of breach
- Hacking/IT Incident
- Location of breached information
- Network Server
- Business associate present
- No
- State
- New York (NY)
- Portal status
- listed in the HHS OCR breach portal archive
- Rank in New York by size
- 1st of 511
- Rank in 2015 nationally
- 3rd of 270
- New York median filing
- 5,338 individuals
- Register id (derived)
- NY-20150909-excellus-health-plan
Section F.2 / In context
Where this filing sits in New York and in 2015
OCR classifies the incident as a hacking or IT incident, with the breached information held in a network server. Hacking/IT Incident is the type recorded on 328 of the 511 New York filings (64%) and on 21% of all filings submitted in 2015. Network Server appears on 49% of New York filings.
No business associate is recorded on the filing; 30% of New York filings do involve one. At 9,358,891 individuals the breach is 1,753 times the New York median filing of 5,338 and 2,340 times the national median of 4,000 across all 7,884 filings. It is one of 149 filings on the register of one million or more individuals.
As of 28 August 2026 the case is listed in the HHS OCR breach portal archive. OCR's closing summary of the case is reproduced in full below.
New York's breach notification statute (N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law 899-aa) requires notice to affected residents in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, no later than 30 days after discovery. Its attorney general threshold: all breaches (AG, Dept. of State, State Police). The HIPAA Breach Notification Rule ran alongside it: notice to affected individuals and to HHS without unreasonable delay and no later than 60 days after discovery, which is the clock that put this filing on the portal.
Multiplying 9,358,891 individuals by IBM's $160 customer-PII cost per record (Cost of a Data Breach 2025, the figure the site's calculator uses) gives a modelled $1.50B; the 2026 edition's $192 gives $1.80B. Both are modelled estimates with the method shown, not costs disclosed by Excellus Health Plan, Inc.. Because the filing is above the roughly 100,000-record range in which the per-record figure is reliable, the result is an upper bound, not an estimate: fixed costs are spread across far more records at this scale.
Section F.3 / OCR closing summary
The portal's archived description, in full
Written by the Office for Civil Rights when the case was closed and reproduced verbatim from the HHS export.
Excellus Health Plan, Inc. has agreed to pay $5.1 million to the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and to implement a corrective action plan to settle potential violations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Privacy and Security Rules related to a breach affecting over 9.3 million people. Excellus Health Plan is a New York health services corporation that provides health insurance coverage to over 1.5 million people in Upstate and Western New York.
On September 9, 2015, Excellus Health Plan filed a breach report stating that cyber-attackers had gained unauthorized access to its information technology systems. Excellus Health Plan reported that the breach began on or before December 23, 2013, and ended on May 11, 2015. The hackers installed malware and conducted reconnaissance activities that ultimately resulted in the impermissible disclosure of the protected health information of more than 9.3 million individuals, including their names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, Social Security numbers, bank account information, health plan claims, and clinical treatment information.
OCR's investigation found potential violations of the HIPAA Rules including failure to conduct an enterprise-wide risk analysis, and failures to implement risk management, information system activity review, and access controls.
"Hacking continues to be the greatest threat to the privacy and security of individuals' health information. In this case, a health plan did not stop hackers from roaming inside its health record system undetected for over a year which endangered the privacy of millions of its beneficiaries," said OCR Director Roger Severino. "We know that the most dangerous hackers are sophisticated, patient, and persistent. Health care entities need to step up their game to protect the privacy of people's health information from this growing threat."
In addition to the monetary settlement, Excellus Health Plan will undertake a corrective action plan that includes two years of monitoring. A copy of the resolution agreement and corrective action plan may be found at https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/excellus-ra-cap.pdf - PDF.*
Section F.5 / Modelled cost
9,358,891 individuals through IBM's per-record figures
Modelled cost / method shown, not a disclosed cost
Upper boundIBM 2025 customer PII, $160 per record
$1.50B
9,358,891 x $160
IBM 2026 customer PII, $192 per record
$1.80B
9,358,891 x $192
Method: individuals affected, as reported by Excellus Health Plan, Inc. to HHS, multiplied by IBM's customer-PII cost per record (Cost of a Data Breach 2025 Figure 6 and the 2026 edition). No cost has been disclosed by the entity for this filing; the figure is a planning estimate, not a fact about the breach. IBM's per-record figures come from mid-volume breaches and IBM cautions against applying them to breaches involving millions of records; the site's per-record page explains where the multiplication holds and where it breaks down.
Context: IBM's average cost of a healthcare breach is $6.64M in the 2026 report ($7.42M in 2025); the global average across all sectors was $4.44M in 2025.
Cost per record: method and limits / Healthcare breach cost, IBM 2026
Section F.6 / Notification clock
New York statute and the HIPAA rule
State notification statute
New York: N.Y. Gen. Bus. Law 899-aa
amended by the SHIELD Act
- Notice to individuals
- In the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, no later than 30 days after discovery
- Attorney general threshold
- All breaches (AG, Dept. of State, State Police) (Aligned with timing and content of individual notices)
- Private right of action
- Limited: Actual damages only; no statutory damages and no attorney-fee recovery; enforced primarily by the AG
- Penalty
- Greater of $5,000 or $20 per failed notification, capped at $250,000; safeguard violations up to $5,000 each
The HIPAA Breach Notification Rule runs alongside the state statute: notice to affected individuals and to HHS without unreasonable delay and no later than 60 days after discovery.
Section F.7 / Peer filings
New York filings closest in size
Neighbours by size rank among New York filings in 2015, topped up from other years where 2015 has too few. Filings of 10,000 or more link to their own page.
| Covered entity | Type | Individuals | Submitted | Breach type | Location | BA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Newkirk Products, Inc. | Business Associate | 3,466,120 | 9 Aug 2016 | |||
| Enzo Clinical Labs, Inc. | Healthcare Provider | 2,470,000 | 5 Jun 2023 | |||
| IBM | Business Associate | 1,900,000 | 14 Apr 2011 | |||
| Jacobi Medical Center | Healthcare Provider | 90,060 | 28 Apr 2015 | |||
| Freelancers Insurance Company | Health Plan | 43,068 | 24 Mar 2015 |
Index / Companion schedules
13 HHS breach register
→Hub: every filing, by state, year and entity.
04 Biggest breaches
→Mega-breaches with primary-source cost figures.
Industry / Healthcare
→IBM 2026: $6.64M average, 13 years at #1.
Regulation / HIPAA penalties
→OCR enforcement tiers and the 60-day rule.
11 50-state laws
→Deadline, AG threshold and penalties per state.
Cost / Per record
→Where the per-record model is reliable.
Provenance
Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office for Civil Rights, Breach Portal (breaches affecting 500 or more individuals), retrieved 2026-08-28. Public domain. Individuals affected and dates as reported by the covered entity.
Portal: ocrportal.hhs.gov breach report. Statutory basis: HITECH Act section 13402(e)(4): the Secretary must post a list of breaches of unsecured protected health information affecting 500 or more individuals. Breaches affecting fewer than 500 individuals are reported to OCR annually and are not posted, so they are not on this register. Status wording follows the portal's two tabs ("Cases Currently Under Investigation" and "Archive") as of 28 August 2026; a filing moves to the archive when OCR closes the case. Modelled costs on this site are a method applied to the reported count, using IBM Cost of a Data Breach per-record figures, and are never a cost disclosed by the entity. This row: hhs-breach-archive__2026-08-28.csv, export row 5760.
Corrections: if you represent a listed entity and the portal row has been amended, email [email protected] with the portal entry and we will re-pull the export.