UnitedHealth Group, the largest U.S. health insurer, is likely to need several months to make a full recovery from a cyberattack that has been one of the most disruptive hacks against America's healthcare infrastructure, security experts said.
Since its Change Healthcare unit was breached on Feb. 21 by a hacking group called ALPHV, also known as "BlackCat", UnitedHealth has said it is working to restore impacted channels, and that some of its systems are returning to normal. While it has not provided a timeline for full recovery, cybersecurity analysts say that is likely quite far off.
“The amount of disruption suggests they don’t have alternate systems at the ready,” said Chester Wisniewski, a director at the cybersecurity firm Sophos. “It’s been 13, 14 days, and that is already longer than I’d expect for backup systems to be spun up.”
Change processes about 50% of medical claims in the U.S. for around 900,000 physicians, 33,000 pharmacies, 5,500 hospitals and 600 laboratories. About 1 in 3 U.S. patient records are touched by its health technology offerings, making it an attractive target for hackers looking to gain access to a large swathe of healthcare data.
Customers directly impacted may see a fix sooner, “but the back end, it takes a couple months, or upwards of a year,” said Wisniewski, who has tracked such breaches for over 20 years.
A UnitedHealth spokesman said the company was focused on investigating the hack and restoring operations at Change Healthcare.
U.S. officials have stepped in to help curb the chaos stemming from the breach that has hit smaller medical care providers particularly hard, with many struggling to process payments.
Similar breaches last year against gambling firm MGM Resorts International and consumer products company Clorox impacted them for months, costing MGM at least $100 million in damages and Clorox a drop of more than $350 million in quarterly net sales.
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