Centers Laboratory, a healthcare testing and laboratory services provider, has disclosed a data breach affecting roughly 540,000 individuals, with the extortion group WorldLeaks claiming to have stolen 720 gigabytes of data, as reported by SecurityWeek.

Healthcare data is a particularly bad thing to lose. Lab and testing records can tie a person's identity to their medical history, and that combination does not expire the way a leaked password does. It fuels targeted fraud, insurance and identity abuse, and extortion, and there is no reset button for a diagnosis.

The involvement of a named extortion group points to the now-standard playbook. Steal the data first, then pressure the organization to pay to keep it from being published. Whether or not a ransom is paid, the information is already outside the victim's control, which is the part that matters most to the people whose records were taken.

For affected individuals, the practical steps are to watch for medical and insurance fraud, treat health-themed messages with suspicion, and consider a credit freeze. For organizations holding health data, the lesson is again about detection time and limiting blast radius, because the value of the data guarantees it will keep drawing this kind of attention.

Sources: SecurityWeek.