Background check, drug testing provider DISA suffers data breach
DISA Global Solutions, a Texas-based company that provides employment screening services (including drug and alcohol testing and background checks) for over 55,000 organizations, has suffered a cyber incident that led to a data breach, which resulted in the potential compromise of personal and financial information of over 3.3 million individuals.
What is known about the breach?
DISA discovered the breach on April 22, 2024, and the subsequent investigation revealed that an unauthorized third party accessed “a limited portion of their environment” on February 9, 2024.
In between those dates, the threat actor had access to certain files.
“Although our forensics investigation could not definitively conclude the specific information procured, the affected files contained individuals’ personal information, which came into our possession due to the employment screening services we provide employers and prospective employers,” the company stated in a notice published on its official website.
“The personal information contained in these files may have included name, social security number, driver’s license number, other government ID numbers, financial account information, and other data elements. Not every data element was present for every individual.”
The attacker apparently did not have access to medical records.
While this notification does not say how many individuals have been affected, the data breach notification on the site of the Office of the Maine Attorney General says the number is 3,332,750.
Those individuals have been or will be notified by the company directly, and will be offered access to credit monitoring and identity restoration services through Experian.
DISA says that at the moment, they “are unaware of any attempted or actual misuse of any information involved in this incident.” Nevertheless, the company is urging users to take advantage of the aforementioned services and to:
- Ask for and review their credit report for suspicious activity
- Consider placing a fraud alert on their credit file and/or placing a security freeze on their credit report (the latter process is somewhat onerous and may interfere with the individual’s requests for new loans, credit mortgages, employment, housing, or other services).
-
DISA says that they’ve notified law enforcement of the intrusion, and that they’ve secured their network and implemented additional security measures.