Breach at Quest Diagnostics – Is your business safe?

The Security Breach at Quest Diagnostics

In the United States, Quest Diagnostics is the leading blood testing provider available. Unfortunately, there was a recent breach to the security systems which protect their customers’ medical information, personal information, and financial information. It is estimated that about 12 million customers of Quest Diagnostics were affected by the breach. The company sent a warning notice to the affected customers about this situation.

The billing collection company, American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA), operates the systems which Quest Diagnostics uses to store all the sensitive information of their customers. This includes social security numbers, bank account numbers, and credit card numbers. According to securities officials, an outside entity gained unauthorized access to the AMCA systems from August 1^st, 2018 to March 30^th, 2019. This is 7 months where someone had exposure to such sensitive details.

An internal review is currently being conducted into the matter. For the time being, Quest Diagnostics’ payments webpage has been temporarily disabled until they are confident that no other security breach exists. There is a third-party vendor handling their payments for now. Furthermore, the company has hired security professionals to advise them on how to increase the security in their systems to prevent this type of “data incident” from happening again.

There is some good news. Even though the medical information and social security numbers of customers were exposed, there was no exposure of their laboratory test results. This might make some people happy who’d rather keep their medical test results to themselves. But still, it is a headache for customers to deal with the possible threat of identity theft and financial loss over this incident.

Once the forensic professionals have completed their investigation, Quest Diagnostics will reinstate AMCA. For now, AMCA has yet to provide Quest Diagnostics with complete and detailed information regarding the data incident (or hack). They want to know exactly which customers were affected and which ones were not. Perhaps they’ll be privy to this information later.

Surprisingly, the stock price of Quest Diagnostics did not change after the security breach announcement. They are a fairly big company with about 2,200 facilities throughout the country. This shows that customers still trust them enough to retain their business.

How To Keep Your Business Safe

With Hackers actively trying to breach companies and their secure information you have to ask yourself is your company safe. Too often companies feel their I.T. departments have them “safe enough”. But instead of hoping to be safe enough go to the trusted experts in the field. People that are licensed to protect you and your business from cyber threats. Texas Data and VoIP have the expertise to bring you from “safe enough” to fully confident.