On November 15, Equinox notified clients and staff members about what they described as a data security incident on April 29. With a little digging, DataBreaches realized that it was an attack by LockBit3.0.
Equinox is a human services organization that serves clients in the capital region of New York State, providing services to 3,500 people annually in 10 locations, including residential facilities. According to their website, they serve youth, adults, and families whose lives have been impacted by domestic violence, drug and alcohol addictions, mental health disorders, homelessness, and the challenges of living amid poverty and violence. Equinox works collaboratively with numerous community organizations.
In a substitute notice on its website, Equinox states that the incident disrupted access to some of its network resources, but it does not state whether this was a ransomware attack or if it involved any encryption of any files. On May 18, however, LockBit3.0 added Equinox to its leak site, and on August 11, they updated the listing, giving Equinox until August 25 to respond. LockBit eventually leaked 31.8 GB of files from Equinox.
Equinox’s breach notification letter does not mention that data was actually leaked by any threat actor(s). What it does disclose is that the types of information that may have been accessed or exfiltrated without authorization included name, address, date of birth, Social Security number, driver’s license or other government identification number, passport number, financial account information, health insurance information, medical treatment or diagnosis information, and/or medication-related information.
As in many other breaches, the type of information varied by individual, and as in too many other breaches, inspection of a file tree reveals that in addition to recent data, the data tranche included files with personal or protected health information that was more than a decade old.
The total number of people affected by this breach has not yet been publicly reported, and as of publication, no submission to HHS OCR has yet shown up on HHS’s public breach tool.
This post was corrected to show that LockBit first added Equinox to its site on May 18, 2024. A previous version incorrectly reported it as May 24.