North Carolina based LabCorp AKA Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings has mentioned in its recent 8K filings to the US Security Exchange Commission that it became a victim to a ransomware attack on July 14th this year. And some of its IT assets are still under the encryption of the hackers.
Note 1- 8K-filing is a process where a company informs its investors about specified events which are supposed to be known to the shareholders.
It’s said that the ransomware attack resulted in the impact of certain test processing and client access systems as the authorities chose to shut them down to contain the malware spread.
The temporary disruption is said to have resulted in affected the test processing and customer access to test results over the last weekend. LabCorp healthcare authorities are working round the clock to restore the systems via backups and have succeeded in resuming certain set of IT operations by Monday evening.
Some of the customers accessing the results might observe a slight delay in receiving their lab report results as the company needs time to become fully operational.
How the data encrypting malware reached the systems is being investigated. But sources added that none of the IT assets related to Covance Drug Department were affected in the incident.
FBI has been informed about the incident and a third-party security company is yet to be pressed into service for a detailed review of how the malware got into the network and its impact on the current IT assets.
Note 2- LabCorp is a 10.3 billion worth company which operates as one of the largest clinical laboratory networks in the world. It has over 36 Primary testing centers in the US and is known to perform largest volumes of specialty testing at its center. This includes Genomic testing using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) technology and other molecular diagnostics. As per the Wikipedia page of LabCorp, the company encounters around 115 million patients a year and processes more than 2.5 million patient tests on a weekly basis.
Note 3- Interception of data has been confirmed by LabCorp. But it has to yet confirm the news of malware attack and the ransomware variant which infected its systems.
