Quest Diagnostics is a leading clinical laboratory company in the US. The former provides diagnostic testing and services for a range of medical conditions. The company has 7,700 centers in North America. Quest has 65,000 employees and boasts of an annual revenue of over $11 billion.

On Thursday, Quest Diagnostics reported unauthorized access to its Quanum Lab Services Manager. The latter is a platform where customers can place test orders and obtain or check their results. As per Quest, it detected the hack on Wednesday and informed federal law enforcement. The number of affected patients and records is not yet known. There are chances that the stolen data could be misused for identity theft or sophisticated phishing campaigns.

For your information, Quest Diagnostics has suffered cyberattacks earlier. In 2016, as per the company data such as lab results and contact details of around 34,000 individuals was leaked. In 2019, personal details of around 11.9 million patients were affected after a hack at a billing collections service provider.

This week there was an AI-aided detection of vulnerabilities in the PHP programming language which is utilized in 70% of websites worldwide. However, Quest Diagnostics stated that its data breach was not related to the PHP issue.

SOURCES:-

https://www.securityweek.com/quest-diagnostics-reports-cyber-breach-affecting-certain-patient-records/

https://www.securitymagazine.com/articles/102689-cyber-breach-hits-quest-diagnostics-patient-records-may-be-affected

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/quest-diagnostics-reports-cyber-breach-affecting-certain-patient-recor-rcna605146

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/quest-diagnostics-confirms-data-breach-exposed-patient-records/