We got press!

[editor: One slight correction: there was no hacking involved. We found the first of the marketing materials on Google and that led us to the rest. None of the documents were behind the firewall, and all were easily accessible to anyone on the Internet. Makes you wonder if that claptrap HealthConnect system, which contains ALL of your personal and medical info, is secure. And since Kaiser has outsourced much of the work to India (causing many hardworking American IT folks to lose their jobs), WHO KNOWS what could happen? Can you say “identity theft” anyone?]

From San Francisco Business Times:

Kaiser is ‘Thrive’-ing — but so are its online foes

Kaiser Permanente took the wraps off a new $40 million ad campaign last week, a massive marketing blitz — nicknamed “Thrive” — that will highlight Kaiser’s position on all sorts of health-related issues.

Perhaps it should have included a recommended treatment for hacking. Not the kind associated with a bad chest cold, mind you, the kind associated with unauthorized access to a computer system.

For by the time the ad campaign was ready for rollout, the “Kaiser Permanente Reform Committee” was ready to roll with a little marketing of its own.

Despite the rather official-sounding name, the reform committee has nothing to do with Kaiser — except to run a web site where former employees and patients, all of the disgruntled variety, illuminate in excruciatingly voluminous detail a catalog of alleged misdeeds by the health-care giant.

And an unidentified someone had found his or her way into the bowels of Kaiser’s computer systems and pulled out a lot of ad mock-ups, internal marketing documents and other materials associated with the campaign — which were promptly posted on the site.

Perhaps proving there are people out there with way too much free time on their hands, the Kaiser foes put together ads of their own — parodies that follow the form and style of Kaiser’s upcoming ads, though with decidedly less favorable verbiage.

More potently, they obtained rights for the web address kaiserthrive.org. Clicking there leads you not to Kaiser or its ad campaign, but “Kaiser Thrive Exposed,” a sort of smorgasbord of the group’s various rants about the health system.

“For your amusement, our theme song all week has been, ‘We Three Kings Be Stealing the Brand,'” said a spokeswoman, who identified herself as a former Kaiser employee, in an email to the Business Times. “I do think this incident should make people question Kaiser’s overall technical security.”

Kaiser’s reply? No comment.