Company believes certain patient records accessed; scope under investigation
Quest Diagnostics’ Quanum Lab Services Manager is a platform where certain clients can place test orders and receive or look up their results, according to the company’s Thursday regulatory filing. The New Jersey-based medical laboratory operator said it learned of a cyber breach of one of its systems this week, likely compromising some records for patients. The filing reported “unauthorized access” to the platform.
Quest Diagnostics said it believes “certain patient records” were accessed. How many patients and which particular records have been affected remain unknown, and the full scope remains under investigation.
Quest Diagnostics said it discovered the hack on Wednesday and notified federal law enforcement. The laboratory operator also said it is working with external cybersecurity experts to assist in its response.
Quest Diagnostics has seen hacks affecting patient records before. In 2016, the company said data including lab results and contact information for about 34,000 people was exposed in another online breach.
In 2019, other personal information belonging to about 11.9 million Quest patients was affected after a separate hack at American Medical Collection Agency, a billing collections service provider, according to The Associated Press.
The Associated Press reported that cyberattacks are on the rise across industries. Beyond healthcare, other breaches have recently disrupted supermarket chains and core education applications.
According to The Associated Press, governments and companies worldwide are working more broadly on online security updates. The report said this week’s activity followed an AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language described as vital to 70% of websites globally.
Many have continued to experience outages and limited service as firms work to patch those risks.
Based on the company’s investigation, Quest Diagnostics confirmed to The Associated Press on Thursday that its cyber breach was not related to the PHP issue.
For clients that used Quanum Lab Services Manager to order tests or retrieve results, the disclosure does not yet say whether their information was among the records accessed.