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US medical health insurance large UnitedHealth Group has confirmed a ransomware assault towards its well being know-how subsidiary Change Healthcare, which continues to disrupt hospitals and pharmacies throughout the US.
“Change Healthcare can verify that we’re experiencing a cybersecurity concern perpetrated by a cybercrime risk actor who introduced itself to us as ALPHV/Blackcat,” Tyler Mason, vice chairman of UnitedHealth, mentioned in an announcement at TechCrunch on Thursday.
“Our consultants are working to resolve the problem and we’re working carefully with legislation enforcement and main third-party consultants, Mandiant and Palo Alto Community, on this assault on Change Healthcare methods. We’re actively working to know the impression on members, sufferers and prospects,” Mason mentioned.
“Primarily based on our ongoing investigation, there isn’t any indication that, aside from the Change Healthcare methods, the Optum, UnitedHealthcare and UnitedHealth Group methods had been affected by this concern.”
In a put up printed Wednesday on its Darkish Internet leak web site, ALPHV/BlackCat took credit score for the Change Healthcare cyberattack. The Russia-based ransomware and extortion gang claimed to have stolen thousands and thousands of People’ delicate well being and affected person data.
ALPHV/BlackCat’s claims couldn’t instantly be verified.
Change Healthcare is an American well being know-how large and one of many nation’s largest prescription drug processors, managing prescriptions and billing for greater than 67,000 pharmacies throughout the U.S. healthcare system. The well being tech large handles 15 billion healthcare transactions per 12 months, or about one in three American affected person information.
The cyberattack began on February 21 very early on the East Coast of the USA, inflicting widespread outages in pharmacies and healthcare services. Change Healthcare mentioned it took a lot of its methods offline to pressure hackers out of its methods.
Altering healthcare incident monitoring web page exhibits that almost all of its customer-facing methods stay offline.
Hospitals, healthcare suppliers and pharmacies have reported that they’re unable to fill or course of prescriptions via sufferers’ insurance coverage.
UnitedHealth had beforehand attributed the cyberattack to an unspecified state actor. Researchers have but to find out a hyperlink between the ALPHV/BlackCat group and a authorities.
It is a creating story… extra quickly.
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