Change Healthcare says it has notified approximately 100 million Americans that their personal, financial and healthcare records may have been stolen in a February 2024 ransomware attack that caused the largest ever known data breach of protected health information.
Image: Tamer Tuncay, Shutterstock.com.
A ransomware attack at Change Healthcare in the third week of February quickly spawned disruptions across the U.S. healthcare system that reverberated for months, thanks to the company’s central role in processing payments and prescriptions on behalf of thousands of organizations.
In April, Change estimated the breach would affect a “substantial proportion of people in America.” On Oct 22, the healthcare giant notified the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources (HHS) that “approximately 100 million notices have been sent regarding this breach.”
A notification letter from Change Healthcare said the breach involved the theft of:
-Health Data: Medical record #s, doctors, diagnoses, medicines, test results, images, care and treatment;
-Billing Records: Records including payment cards, financial and banking records;
-Personal Data: Social Security number; driver’s license or state ID number;
-Insurance Data: Health plans/policies, insurance companies, member/group ID numbers, and Medicaid-Medicare-government payor ID numbers.
The HIPAA Journal reports that in the nine months ending on September 30, 2024, Change’s parent firm United Health Group had incurred $1.521 billion in direct breach response costs, and $2.457 billion in total cyberattack impacts.
Those costs include $22 million the company admitted to paying their extortionists — a ransomware group known as BlackCat and ALPHV — in exchange for a promise to destroy the stolen healthcare data.
That ransom ..
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