There’s been another medical data breach. This time, it affects LabCorp. In all, 7.7 million patients have been exposed.
Labcorp is apparently the latest victim of a data breach. In all, 7.7 million patients have had their personal information exposed. Reports suggest that this breach is related to the Quest Diagnostics data breach which saw 12 million patients exposed to hackers. Here’s one report from The Washington Post:
LabCorp, a medical testing company, said 7.7 million customers had their personal and financial data exposed through a breach at a third-party billing collections company.
The news came just days after the same contractor, American Medical Collection Agency, notified Quest Diagnostics about the full scope of a breach affecting 11.9 million of its patients. That breach allowed an “unauthorized user” to gain access to financial information, Social Security numbers and medical data but not lab results.
“AMCA has indicated that it is continuing to investigate this incident and has taken steps to increase the security of its systems, processes, and data,” LabCorp said in a filing Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “LabCorp takes data security very seriously, including the security of data handled by vendors.”
The breach did not reveal information such as which tests were ordered or lab results, LabCorp said in the filing. But from August 2018 to March, the hacker was able to access names, birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, dates of service, account balances and other information.
The breach also exposed credit card and bank numbers attached to roughly 200,000 accounts, the filing said. AMCA told LabCorp that it was in the process of notifying those patients.
June is proving to be a bumpy month for data breaches. Over top of the Quest Diagnostics breach, there is also the data breach that affected Marriott’s parent company. In that case, 85.4GB of security information was compromised. Then, there is the First American data leak which saw 885 million records exposed.
The news comes as countries are ramping up the war on encryption and security. Australia kicked things off last year by rushing their anti-security bill through the legislative process. More recently, Germany and the UK are both moving forward with proposals to weaken security. No doubt this is great news for hackers and fraudsters hoping to continue this constant string of security incidences.
While some fines have been handed out to companies, it seems that there still is no end in sight to this data security crises.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
