UnitedHealth says Change Healthcare hack affects over 100 million, the largest-ever US healthcare data breach
UnitedHealth, the largest U.S. health insurance provider, blamed a Russia-based ransomware gang for the huge data breach of U.S. medical data.
More than 100 million individuals had their private health information stolen during the ransomware attack on Change Healthcare in February, a cyberattack that caused months of unprecedented outages and widespread disruption across the U.S. healthcare sector.
This is the first time that UnitedHealth Group (UHG), the U.S. health insurance provider that owns the health tech company, has put a number of affected individuals to the data breach, after previously saying it anticipated the breach to include data on a “substantial proportion of people in America.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services first reported the updated number on its data breach portal on Thursday.
UHG spokesperson Tyler Mason said in a brief statement: “We continue to notify potentially impacted individuals as quickly as possible, on a rolling basis, given the volume and complexity of the data involved and the investigation is still in its final stages.”
The ransomware attack and data breach at Change Healthcare stands as the largest known digital theft of U.S. medical records, and one of the biggest data breaches in living history. The ramifications for the millions of Americans whose private medical information was irretrievably stolen are likely to be life lasting.
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