UnitedHealth says Change Healthcare hacked by nation-state, as US pharmacy outages drag on

Image Credits: Mike Bradley / Bloomberg / Getty Images

U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group (UHG) said Thursday in a filing with government regulators that its subsidiary Change Healthcare was compromised, likely by government-backed hackers.

In a filing Thursday, UHG blamed the ongoing cybersecurity incident affecting Change Healthcare on suspected nation-state hackers but said it had no timeframe for when its systems would be back online.

UHG did not attribute the cyberattack to a specific nation or government, or cite what evidence it had to support its claim.

A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment at the time of writing.

Change Healthcare provides patient billing across the U.S. healthcare system. The company processes billions of healthcare transactions annually and claims it handles around one in three U.S. patient records, amounting to around 100 million Americans.

The cyberattack began early Wednesday, according to the company’s incident tracker.

Change Healthcare has not yet disclosed the specific nature of its cyberattack.

Pharmacies across the U.S. are reporting that they are unable to fulfill prescriptions through patients’ insurance due to the ongoing outage at Change Healthcare, which handles much of the billing process.

Several people who work in the healthcare space and whose work is affected by the outage tell TechCrunch that they are experiencing downtime because of the ongoing cyberattack.

UHG said in its filing that it has “retained leading security experts, is working with law enforcement and notified customers, clients and certain government agencies.”