A drug screening laboratory suffered a data breach

A setup issue caused a data breach at a drug screening lab in Florida county. The security breach occurred at the Drug Screening Lab (SLC Lab) of St. Lucie County, which provides drug testing services for employment, court proceedings, and other purposes.

In a statement released on January 20, 2022, county officials said that a misconfiguration discovered in the lab’s website portal had unknowingly exposed a few users’ private information for more than four years.

“SLC Lab identified on December 28, 2021, that data was available to select portal users around June 2, 2017, and October 13, 2021, due to a website portal misconfiguration,” the county claimed.

Full names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and limited lab test type and result information were among the information exposed in the incident.

Erick Gill, a spokesman for St. Lucie County, told WPTV that the error did not affect other data in the county’s possession.

“SLC Lab is committed to protecting the privacy of personal information in its possession and has taken numerous steps to do so,” Gill said.

“SLC Lab evaluates and adapts its processes regularly to improve the security and privacy of the personal information it retains,” he added.