UnitedHealth Group paid ransom to hackers, person familiar with the cyber investigation says
he ransomware attack on a company owned by healthcare giant UnitedHealth Group (UHG) has so far caused $872 million in losses, according to the corporation’s latest earnings report.
UnitedHealth owns Change Healthcare, a key cog in the U.S. healthcare industry that was crippled by a ransomware attack in February. Change Healthcare and UHG subsidiary Optum took hundreds of systems offline as a result of the incident and faced criticism from the White House and Congress over its handling of the ransomware attack.
This is the second group to demand a ransom payment from Change Healthcare to prevent the release of stolen patient data in as many months.
RansomHub, which is speculated to have some connection to ALPHV, has stolen 4TB of sensitive data from the beleaguered healthcare company.
The reports keep coming in from across the country on how the Change Healthcare ransomware attack that first came to light on Feb. 21 has been impacting the healthcare sector.
The case has been called the most severe cyberattack on the healthcare sector in history and has had a great impact since Change Healthcare, owned by UnitedHealth Group, processes 15 billion healthcare transactions annually, affecting 1 in 3 patient records.
