The IT Nerd

If you’re Canadian and used Life Labs to get something like a blood test or some other medical test, I have bad news for you. According to CTV News, they’ve been the victim of hackers and the details are not good:

Hackers may have obtained the personal data of 15 million LifeLabs clients after a systems breach, and this includes addresses, passwords, birthdays, health card number and even lab results.

And:

The letter said the majority of these customers were in B.C. and Ontario, with relatively few customers in other locations.

There are no details about how long the hackers were in the Life Labs IT environment or who the hackers were, but needless to say this is bad. Hopefully people like the Privacy Commissioner of Canada are paying attention as this is something that needs a robust investigation and remedial action if it is found that Life Labs screwed up in some way to allow this to happen.

By the way, isn’t it beyond time that Canada get GDPR style regulations to ensure that companies up their game when it comes to securing data so that we don’t keep talking about this?

UPDATE: The Star is reporting the company paid a ransom to get the data back….. Which is kind of scary….. And they have more details.

UPDATE #2: CBC News is reporting that Life Labs have had data breaches before.

This entry was posted on December 17, 2019 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Commentary with tags Canada, Hacked. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.