To mitigate the impact of these incidents, he advises providers to have an incident response plan in place with different departments and divisions educated on how to engage other parts of their organization to contain attacks and limit the exposure and damage they cause.

Other tactics to consider include strict monitoring of what goes in and out of a network or deployment of a third-party incident response team to enhance the security of a company’s information resources and databases as ways of ensuring organizations are doing all they can do identify any issues, eliminate threats and minimize impacts to data.


“In instances like this it is very important to understand if anything is leaving their environment; once information leaves, it is no longer under their control and whoever has that information can do with as they would like,” said Dixon. “It could even end up for sale in dark web markets.”

Ransomware was only detected on LabCorp Diagnostics systems and did not affect Covance Drug Development systems.

The investigation is ongoing.

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