Prescription Insecurity: The Russian Connection to Healthcare Cyber Attacks

Pharmacies and hospitals nationwide are experiencing disruptions as a result of ransomware attacks, which leaves patients with difficulties filling prescriptions or obtaining medical care. UnitedHealth Group, a healthcare provider in the United States, announced on Thursday that it had been hacked by a ransomware gang known as Black Cat, otherwise known as AlphV. 

There was a breach of security at Optum last week, causing its digital healthcare payment platform, known as Change Healthcare, to be taken offline as a result of a “cybersecurity issue.” Optum, which provides healthcare benefits across the United States, announced last week that it was impacted by a “cybersecurity issue.” 

There are a variety of legal issues that have resulted in hospitals, pharmacies and other healthcare providers being unable to access the popular payment platform or purposefully disabling connections to its network so as not to allow hackers to gain access to the sensitive data. In a statement on Monday, UnitedHealth estimates that more than 90% of the 70,000 pharmacies in the U.S. have had to change how they processed electronic claims in response to the outage, as more than 90% of them are going to change how they process claims in the future. 

A UnitedHealth executive on a conference call with cybersecurity officers was quoted as saying that, according to a UnitedHealth executi

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