Quest Diagnostics Discloses Cyberattack on Quanum Lab Platform
The company notified regulators that its lab testing systems were compromised, potentially exposing sensitive patient records.
By Jacob Leary ·
Quest Diagnostics confirmed on Thursday that a cyberattack compromised patient records stored in its systems, an incident that came to light earlier this week. The lab testing giant learned of the intrusion on Wednesday, targeting Quanum, a platform used by healthcare providers to request tests and handle billing. The company disclosed the matter in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, stating that unauthorized access included "certain patient records." Quest has notified law enforcement and is investigating the breach.
Quanum is a significant system within the healthcare infrastructure, serving about half a million clinicians across thousands of locations in North America. It stores extensive patient health and medical records alongside associated diagnostic and billing data. The scale of the data held by Quanum is substantial; while Quest has not disclosed how many records were accessed, a case study on its own site from 2026 shows that a single health system with more than 6 million patients can generate hundreds of millions of related medical documents. Quest has not yet specified how many patients were affected by this specific incident.
The attack is the latest in a series of significant cyber incidents targeting the healthcare industry this year. Recent months have seen attacks on Stryker in March, which resulted in the mass-wiping of employee devices, and on Boston Scientific in August, which forced its network offline for weeks. Hacks have also led to massive breaches of patient data at CareCloud, Craneware, and McKesson. This marks the second known major data breach for Quest in a decade, following a 2019 incident where 11.9 million patient records were lost via a third-party billing company.
Quest has not said when the breach began or whether any hacking group has contacted the company with demands. A company spokesperson did not answer questions about the incident, referring instead to a security notice. The notice states that some patients' protected health information was taken, including "personal information and patient records," but the company is still investigating what specific kinds of data were taken. The notice is not easily found, as its website post currently contains code that prevents search engines from listing the page.
Source: TechCrunch
