Home
Artists
Search
Recent
Random
Posts
DMs
Tags
Random
Importer
Import
FAQ
Account
Register
Favorites
Login
Quest Diagnostics Health Data Breach - Threatwire CrossPost (Patreon)
Downloads
Content
By Shannon Morse, Threatwire
According to a release published on June 3 by Quest Diagnostics-- a medical testing company with labs across the US-- the billing collections service used by Quest, called American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA for short), was hit with a data breach. AMCA notified Quest Diagnostics of the breach on May 14, and later, on May 31, updated them with the total affected users, which amounted to 11.9 million patients.
AMCA does billing collections for Optum360, who is a Quest contractor and a unit of United Health Group Inc, hence the connection between the two. Quest outsourced all of its billing operations to Optum360, who then contracted AMCA. The company believes information obtained in the breach included personal information like financial data, social security numbers, credit card numbers, and medical information. No laboratory results were included in the breach.
Quest Diagnostics did explain in their update that they weren’t able to validate the accuracy of content received from AMCA nor could they verify which patients were affected specifically. Quest has suspended any collection requests with AMCA for the time being. AMCA believes the breach occurred between August 1 2018 through March 30 2019.
This is the second breach involving Quest Diagnostics data since 2016, when 34000 patients had their data stolen. In that case, the breach occurred directly through their patient portal, not a third party provider. AMCA told Bloomberg that it took down its web payment page, moved online payments to a third party, and retained security experts.
Links:
http://newsroom.questdiagnostics.com/AMCADataSecurityIncident
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/quest-diagnostics-breach/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-quest-data-hack-1214-biz-20161213-story.html