U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group said Thursday in a filing with government regulators that its subsidiary Change Healthcare was likely compromised 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 has not decided when the system will come back online. Ta.
UHG did not attribute the cyberattack to any particular country or government, nor did it cite any evidence to support its claims.
A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment at the time of writing.
Change Healthcare provides billing for patients across the U.S. healthcare system. The company processes billions of medical transactions annually and claims to handle the patient records of about 1 in 3 Americans, or about 100 million Americans.
The cyberattack began early Wednesday morning, according to the company's incident tracker.
Change Healthcare has not yet disclosed the specific nature of the cyberattack.
Pharmacies across the United States are reporting that they are unable to fulfill prescriptions using patients' insurance due to ongoing outages at Change Healthcare, which handles much of the billing process.
Several people who work in the healthcare field and whose jobs have been affected by the disability told TechCrunch that the ongoing cyberattack is causing downtime.
UHG said in the filing that it has “employed leading security experts, cooperated with law enforcement agencies, and notified customers, clients, and certain government agencies.”