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Cybersecurity experts are questioning why it took one of Australia’s most significant pathology services eight months to tell its patients that data had been stolen and posted online in a hidden area of the internet.
Australian Clinical Labs (ACL) revealed that it had been the victim of a cyber attack eight months ago. The attack occurred in February, and since then, the data of 223,000 people have been accessed, and some of it posted to the dark web.
The company that offers COVID-19 testing went public with the ASX about their hacking crisis the day after Medibank’s became known.
As early as March, the company was notified by relevant authorities that it may have been the victim of a ransomware attack. In June, those same authorities told Medlab that some of its data had appeared in deep recesses of the internet.
Richard Buckland from the University of New South Wales said, “They’ve been sitting on this for a long time.”
“It is strange that it took them months to tell the public once they found out that information, credit card details, etc., had been taken without permission.”
Cybersecurity expert Troy Hunt agreed that it seemed like a long time for ACL to have waited before notifying those whose data was compromised.
“If they find out in March and then wait until October, that’s seven months… there is no excuse for sitting on this,” he said. “They should have disclosed it much sooner.”
ACL has now set up a website for those affected to check if their information was compromised and has offered free credit monitoring services. However, there are concerns over what steps the company took to safeguard patient data in the first place.
“The bigger picture here is that these sorts of breaches keep happening because organisations aren’t taking enough steps to protect their systems from attacks,” said Buckland.
ACL has stated that it will continue to invest in and strengthen its cybersecurity measures, but for now, the damage has already been done to those affected by the data breach.
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