Home > News

LifeLabs Suffers 15 Million Customer Data Leak Attack

By Simon Batt
Lifelabs Featured

As hacking becomes more of a profitable venture than a method of collateral damage, we’re seeing bigger and bigger companies fall victim to hackers. Recently, the largest health company in Canada, LifeLabs, suffered a giant data breach that involved the records of 15 million customers.

What Happened?

Hackers managed to get into LifeLab’s servers through an unpatched entry point in their systems. From there, they gained access to the databases and stole the data they found there. The hackers gained personal details of 15 million customers, including names, home addresses, email addresses, usernames, and passwords.

Lifelabs Hacker

Usually, when these hacks occur, the hacker intends to shift the data onto the black market. Here, people interested in such details would buy the details from the hacker. For example, spammers are interested in people’s active email addresses, as they have a higher chance of scoring a successful scam. Usernames and passwords are useful for cracking open other accounts where passwords were reused.

However, this time, the hackers were “benevolent.” Instead of selling the data on, they contacted LifeLab and gave them a compromise. The hackers would return the data to LifeLab if they paid a large sum of money.

LifeLab felt pressured to recover its customers’ details, so they paid the sum. It’s undisclosed how much money they had to pay, but given how they are the largest health company in Canada, it’s safe to say the sum was vast.

The New Era of Cybercrime

This attack is a prime example of the direction hacking is taking. Last year we saw a nasty spike of ransomware attacks as hackers discovered the potential for a huge ransom.

Lifelabs Ransomware

However, companies rose up to defend against the ransomware. Security firms found holes in the ransomware and undid its encryption without the victim paying a penny. Windows even comes with an anti-ransomware feature now, specifically to tackle this problem.

As such, while ransomware does still work in the present-day, it’s not as sure-fire to get a payout than it used to be. Now it appears the hackers are taking the role of the ransom collector, instead of letting a program handle it. To achieve this, the hackers need to steal data from the source and ensure there are no backups remaining.

It’s a tricky gambit, but if they pull it off like above, they can see huge returns for their efforts; that is if they don’t get caught red-handed in the future!

Companies should already be keeping secure backups of their data, but if anything makes for a good case for one, it’s this attack. If a company fails to properly back up, they may have to pay even more to a hacker once their data is held for ransom.

Daylight Robbery

Hackers are moving to big businesses for their payouts, and the LifeLabs attack is a worrying example of this. Hacking isn’t about doing damage for the sake of fun anymore; now it’s about stealing important credentials and demanding a sum to get them back.

Do you think paying the criminals is the best path? Or does this encourage other hackers to follow suit? Let us know below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Simon Batt Avatar
Simon Batt
Simon Batt is a Computer Science graduate with a passion for cybersecurity.

Read next

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.
Explore the historic Roman bridge in lush Salamanca, Spain captured beautifully in daylight.
The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.
When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.