Industry News: ESG5

The target: Benefit Recovery Specialists Inc, a Houston-based billing and debt collection vendor.

The take: 275,000 records of Personally Identifiable Information such as: name, date of birth, date of service, provider name, policy identification number, procedure code, and/or diagnosis code. For a small number of the records, Social Security numbers were also leaked.

The attack vector: The attackers accessed BRSI’s systems with stolen employee credentials, and used their access to deploy malware internally. While not confirmed by BRSI, experts believe the description of the attack match those of a successful phishing campaign. BRSI’s IT systems hosted the malware for 10 days before the malicious activity was discovered.

This breach highlights the importance of regular employee training and education around common social engineering attacks. The records exposed in this incident, and similar data held by other medically related vendors, underscores the severity of this type of data exposure as it can lead to sophisticated identify theft. It also is a critical reminder for companies using third party vendors that their overall security posture is dependent upon the robustness of all the firms which hold their data.

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