UnitedHealth’s Cyberattack Should Serve as a ‘Wake-up Call’ for HealthCare Sector

 

The US Health and Human Services Department (HHS) announced Tuesday that it would assist doctors and hospitals in locating alternate claims processing platforms to help restart the flow of business following a cyberattack on a UnitedHealth Group (UNH) subsidiary that crippled operations of a large swath of America’s health systems for the past two weeks. 

On February 21, a cyberattack paralysed Change Healthcare, which hospitals, doctors’ offices, and pharmacies use to handle payments and prior authorizations for patient visits and medicines.

United gave a lengthy status update Tuesday afternoon, stating that the attack was carried out by BlackCat, a well-known Russian-backed ransomware outfit. 

The FBI was aware of BlackCat, also known as ALPHV, and was successful in breaching the group at the end of last year, but was unable to put it down. BlackCat has previously targeted a number of healthcare companies. It claimed to have collected up to 6 gigabytes of data during the last attack, and that it received $22 million in bitcoin, a transaction visible on the blockchain, but it is st

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