Omar Ford reports:
Liquid Biopsy specialist, Guardant Health faced a cybersecurity attack about two months ago, according to an SEC filing for the firm’s initial public offering. The Redwood City, CA-based company said that private information from about 1,100 individuals was compromised.
“In July 2018, we experienced a security incident involving a phishing attack, and an unauthorized user obtained access to an email account of one of our employees,” the company said, according to the filing. “We have engaged an independent cybersecurity firm to conduct an investigation of the incident, and while the forensic investigation is still ongoing, it appears that the incident resulted in the unauthorized access of information, including PHI, over a five-day period, relating to approximately 1,100 individuals. The information accessed primarily includes patients’ names, contact information, birth dates, medical diagnosis codes, and, in a very limited number of cases, Social Security numbers.”
Read more on MDDI.
Note that this was not an incident that this site was previously aware of, and checking the SEC filing of September 5, it appears that Guardant had not yet filed with HHS or notified affected patients:
For example, in July 2018, we experienced a security incident involving a phishing attack, and an unauthorized user obtained access to an email account of one of our employees. We have engaged an independent cybersecurity firm to conduct an investigation of the incident, and while the forensic investigation is still ongoing, it appears that the incident resulted in the unauthorized access of information, including PHI, over a five-day period, relating to approximately 1,100 individuals. The information accessed primarily includes patients’ names, contact information, birth dates, medical diagnosis codes, and, in a very limited number of cases, Social Security numbers. We plan to provide timely notices to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and certain state regulators, as well as to individuals affected. As a result of this incident, we may also be subject to additional penalties, such as those described above, as well as other internal and external costs, including those relating to mitigation of the incident. We continue to analyze the information that was accessed and intend to take additional steps to prevent future unauthorized access to our systems and the data we maintain, but we cannot guarantee that additional incidents will be avoided.