On May 10, when DataBreaches.net first reported that the American Medical Collection Agency had been breached, we reported that information from 200,000 payment cards had been found for sale on a top-tier market by Gemini Advisory analysts, whose investigation linked those cards to AMCA. At the time, we did not know how many other payment cards might be put up for sale in other batches at a later date. Nor did we know how much PHI and PII may have been acquired by what appeared to be a hack of AMCA’s patient portal.
That week, very few news outlets picked up my report of the breach. Maybe 200,000 didn’t seem huge or maybe my little blog still doesn’t get the attention it deserves. But this week, everyone is paying attention to the breach because Quest Diagnostics revealed that 11.9 million of their patients were impacted and Quest and Optum360 (who does billing for Quest) are investigating the incident and have suspended referring past due accounts to AMCA in the interim.
Then today, Brian Krebs reported that LabCorp reported that 7.7 million of its patients had personal and/or financial information exposed in the breach. So we’re already at almost 20 million and that’s just from two of AMCA’s clients. As I noted earlier, this may turn out to be the biggest HIPAA breach of 2019.
Of note, Krebs reports that AMCA reportedly informed LabCorp that it is notifying 200,000 LabCorp patients whose credit card or bank account information may have been accessed. That number is the same number of payment cards that Gemini Advisory found up for sale, but Gemini had informed DataBreaches.net that 15% of the cards had personal information such as DOB and/or Social Security numbers. AMCA reportedly informed LabCorp that none of LabCorp’s patients’ SSN were stored on AMCA’s server. So the 200,000 cards for sale are not necessarily — and probably aren’t — all LabCorp patients.
I really fear we are just at the tip of this iceberg.