It’s sad that data breaches are happening more often than ever. Technology is getting better and changing quickly, which means that many businesses don’t have the money to protect their data from more advanced attacks. This leaves them open to people who want to take advantage of them.
But defense department safety measures have gotten better, and incidents like the 2015 data breach that put the information of 78.8 million people at risk are now very rare. up until now.
It was a new ransomware attack in February 2024 that made things hard at pharmacies all over the country. This attachment was originally meant to target Change Healthcare, a UnitedHealth Group subsidiary that handles medical providers’ finances. It ended up compromising the data of 100 million people.
Since UnitedHealth Group makes more money than any other healthcare company in the world, not many people thought this attack would have much of an effect. Their defenses should have been strong enough. This didn’t happen, though, and the attackers were able to get into the Change Healthcare employee system because no two-factor authentication was used for the login credentials.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Finance looked at what happened after the hack and talked about how bad it was across the country. Prescriptions weren’t filled, doctors and hospitals weren’t paid, and insurance companies couldn’t reimburse medical providers. The attack left the whole healthcare system open to attack, and the effects were felt for days afterward.
Many people think that the Change Healthcare hack was the worst cybersecurity incident in American health care history. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, added his voice to the committee’s statement with the quote,
Even though it may not seem like much, about a third of all U.S. citizens are connected to UnitedHealth Group in some way. This means that they stored and attackers were able to access a lot of personal data that was more or less relevant.
It wasn’t subtle or tamed by the CEO of Change Healthcare when he talked about how bad the attack was. TechCrunch reported that he said that the stolen files had personal health information for “a substantial proportion of people in America.”
Who perpetrated the data breach
After a thorough investigation, Change Healthcare confirmed that the data breach was caused by the BlackCat ransomware group. The group also said in a separate dark web post that the attachment was stolen and that the loot was millions of health and patient records that the company had stored.
The group didn’t say why the data was stolen or what they planned to do with it, but it seems likely that some of it will be used for identity theft and other crimes. Anyone who has used Change Healthcare or any of their subsidiaries, either now or in the past, should be on the lookout and protect their personal information and credit to avoid unpleasant surprises.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services confirmed that information about 100 million people was stolen in the data breach. It is not clear what kind of information was gathered about each of these people. Also, this number might go up even more as the company and its cybersecurity experts continue to look into the stolen data.
It’s also possible that the breach didn’t affect as many people because some entries may have been duplicates or didn’t have any personal information on them, but this seems like a hopeless cause. The truth is that data security is still one of the big problems that needs to be solved, even though many companies are working hard to fix it.
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