Summit Pathology Laboratories notified 1.8 million patients of a breach. Less than 48 hours later, they were sued. (1)

On October 18, Summit Pathology and Summit Pathology Laboratories (“Summit”) in Colorado notified HHS of a breach affecting 1,813,538 patients.

By October 21, personal injury law firms started reporting on the breach and recruiting potential plaintiffs.

On October 22, Karen Alexander became aware that Summit had sent her and her family members notifications to their old address.

On October 23, Karen Alexander sued Summit Pathology in Colorado District Court.

There is nothing in her lawsuit complaint that strikes DataBreaches as particularly noteworthy in the allegations or references to HIPAA and the FTC Act, other than her reported frustration that when she contacted Summit’s call center number, they told her they would not mail copies of the notification letters to her new address but they would read her the letter over the phone and she could sign up for complimentary mitigation services.

Alexander does not claim any concrete injury other than suggesting that an uptick in spam starting in April might be connected.

So what happened in this incident and should it be a big deal?

According to Summit’s notification letter,  on or around April 18, 2024, they identified suspicious activity within their computer environment.  The impacted systems reportedly contained demographic and healthcare information, including names, addresses, medical billing and insurance information, certain medical information such as diagnoses, and demographic information such as dates of birth, Social Security numbers, and financial information.

Their letter does not share any details such as how attacker(s) gained access and whether or not it was a ransomware incident or if there was any ransom demand.  As of publication, no ransomware group has claimed responsibility for any attack on them.

There are many questions that have yet to be answered, such as:

1.  Did Summit have MFA deployed? How did the attacker gain access? Did an employee fall for a phishing or social engineering attack? Did the attacker gain access by using a set of employee credentials that had been compromised in another attack but never reset? What happened?
2. For how long was the attacker in their system exfiltrating data?
3. If they did not discover the intrusion or exfiltration quickly, why weren’t they able to?
4. Why did they have so many patients’ unencrypted data on their system? Were these all current patients?
5. What additional security measures did they deploy after the breach that could have — or should have — been deployed before any breach to help prevent it? Were they up-to-date on all patches?

DataBreaches submitted an inquiry to Summit, but no reply was immediately available. This post will be updated when more information becomes available.

Update: According to the law firm representing Summit, the Medusa ransomware gang is responsible for the breach, and reportedly gained access via a phishing email.As of November 2, Medusa has yet to claim responsibility for the attack on its leak site.