UnitedHealth says Change Healthcare hack affects over 100 million, the largest-ever US healthcare data breach
đź”— a linked post to
techcrunch.com »
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originally shared here on
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.”
Really, really hard to feel any sympathy for this organization when you read this a few paragraphs down in the article:
According to its 2023 full-year earnings report, UHG made $22 billion in profit on revenues of $371 billion. [Andrew Witty, CEO of UHC] made $23.5 million in executive compensation the same year.
Let’s say you invest in state-of-the-art workforce development programs, advance threat detection solutions, zero trust and identity management solutions, resilience infrastructure, and throw in some R&D.
Let’s even give UHC the benefit of the doubt and assume they have done all of this.
How are you able to walk away with $22 billion after you’ve allowed the PII of nearly a third of Americans (myself included) to walk out the door and into the hands of cybercriminals?
Nobody else is angry that this news isn’t blasted all over this election cycle?
Nobody else thinks we should be holding this conglomerate’s feet to the fire for this breach?
I’m not here to minimize the importance of other issues like border security and women’s reproductive rights, but I haven’t heard any politician make noise about our horribly inefficient healthcare system at all during this election cycle.
Why can’t we stop picking fights with each other and focus on addressing the systemic issues which lead to companies selling us all out in the name of shareholder value?