On Monday afternoon December 17th staff at the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner received a telephone call from a representative of LifeLabs indicating that the company had been subject to a cyber attack resulting in a third party accessing information of up to 18,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. We were told at that time that this information was limited to names and MCP numbers and not test results. We have been in communication with LifeLabs in an effort to confirm this information and to seek additional information in order to assess the extent to which residents of this Province may be affected by the breach.
The Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Newfoundland and Labrador oversees compliance with this Province’s Personal Health Information Act (PHIA). LifeLabs operates primarily in Ontario and British Columbia and is not a custodian of personal health information subject to PHIA. As a result, it is not within our jurisdiction to directly investigate LifeLabs. However, custodians of personal health information in this Province, such as health professionals and others, may or may not have an arrangement with LifeLabs to provide services, and those custodians are in our jurisdiction and subject to our oversight. We are therefore attempting to learn whether health professionals or other custodians of personal health information based in Newfoundland and Labrador may have been using or facilitating the use of LifeLabs in the care and treatment of patients. A decision about whether to launch a formal investigation will be made after we have had an opportunity to gather more information and further assess this matter.
LifeLabs has operations in Ontario and British Columbia and is subject to the jurisdiction of the the Information and Privacy Commissioners of those provinces. They have issued a joint statement 
announcing that they are conducting a coordinated investigation of the breach. We understand that they will, in due course, issue a published report outlining the findings of that investigation. The Ontario and British Columbia Commissioner’s Offices have reached out to this Office and our other counterparts within Canada to keep us informed of key developments in their investigation.
We hope to provide a further update when we have more information to share with the public.
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Media contact
Sean Murray
Director of Research and Quality Assurance
709-729-6309