Health insurance and services company UnitedHealth Group is blaming a state-sponsored threat actor for a cyberattack on its subsidiary Change Healthcare.
The attack occurred on February 21 and prompted Change Healthcare to shut down its systems, resulting in a nationwide prescription processing outage.
More than 100 Change Healthcare applications across pharmacy, medical record, clinical, dental, patient engagement, and payment services were affected, the company said in an 8-K filing with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission).
UnitedHealth Group said “a suspected nation-state associated cyber security threat actor” gained access to some of Change’s systems that were immediately isolated.
The company also noted that the attack only impacted Change systems and that it “has not determined the incident is reasonably likely to materially impact the company’s financial condition or results of operations.”
As of February 25, however, Change Healthcare has not been able to restore the affected systems, according to an update to UnitedHealth’s incident notification.
“We are working on multiple approaches to restore the impacted environment and will not take any shortcuts or take any additional risk as we bring our systems back online. We will continue to be proactive and aggressive with all our systems and if we suspect any issue with the system, we will immediately take action and disconnect,” the company said.
One of the largest healthcare technology companies in the US following its merger with Optum, Change Healthcare handles billions of healthcare transactions per year and has access to the medical records of roughly one third of the health patients in the country.
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