Ride the Lightning

Quest Diagnostics Breach Affects 11.9 Million People

June 5, 2019

ZDNet reported on June 4th that a massive data breach has struck Quest Diagnostics and the information of up to 11.9 million patients has potentially been compromised. Likely mine is included.

Quest has said that American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), a billing collections provider that works with Quest, informed the company that an unauthorized user had managed to obtain access to AMCA systems.

Quest has not revealed what forms of financial data have been exposed, such as whether card numbers or security codes are included, or whether or not encryption was in place to protect this information.

Quest says that unauthorized activity took place on "AMCA's web payment page," which may suggest a card skimmer was in use. (These kinds of attacks are the specialization of Magecart, a group which has compromised British Airways, Ticketmaster, and other major brands in the past.)

Laboratory test results are not believed to have been compromised.

Quest was made aware of the breach on May 14, but has not been able to verify AMCA's statement, nor does the company know exactly which patients have been involved. Once the firm knows more, impacted patients will be noticed.

Since learning of the data breach, AMCA collection requests have been suspended.

Law enforcement has been notified and a cyber forensics firm has been hired to investigate the security incident. "We hired a third-party external forensics firm to investigate any potential security breach in our systems, migrated our web payments portal services to a third-party vendor, and retained additional experts to advise on, and implement, steps to increase our systems' security," Quest said in a statement.

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