US Health Tech Giant Change Healthcare Hit by Cyberattack

U.S. healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyberattack on its systems. In a brief statement, the company said it was "experiencing a network interruption related to a cyber security issue." From a report: "Once we became aware of the outside threat, in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact," Change Healthcare wrote on its status page. "The disruption is expected to last at least through the day."

The incident began early on Tuesday morning on the U.S. East Coast, according to the incident tracker. The specific nature of the cybersecurity incident was not disclosed. Most of the login pages for Change Healthcare were inaccessible or offline when TechCrunch checked at the time of writing. Michigan local newspaper the Huron Daily Tribune is reporting that local pharmacies are experiencing outages due to the Change Healthcare cyberattack.

Connectwise Control?

[omnichad]

The timing seems a bit too close for it not to be a Connectwise Control (ScreenConnect) breach. Gave attackers complete control over any unpatched instance and all the computers connected to it.

Re:

[laxguy]

*looks around nervously*

All your base are belong to us

[Ol Olsoc]

It is always important to understand that any data, any credit cards and anything on the internet are already in the hands of the bad guys.

This shutting things down after the horses are out of the barn is pretty much just theater at this point.

Although it does make for a weird version of security through obscurity. With the billions of credit cards pwned, what is the likelihood yours will be picked to charge something on?

Re:All your base are belong to us

[gweihir]

Actually the network shutdown makes a lot of sense. Unless they are _really_ incompetent, they will have a segmented network and only some segments will be affected by the attack. The network shutdown prevents it from spreading further. It takes a while (depending on how good logging, sensors and security experts are) to identify which segments were affected and which systems in them. This does then speed cleanup massively, because they can concentrate on the affected and possibly affected systems and can ignore the rest. The second thing they need to be doing before connecting things to the Internet again, and after restoring compromised systems from backup, is identification of the attack vector. Otherwise they may just get attacked again within a short time.

OT: long noun phrases

[jonadab]

I love this headline, from a purely linguistic standpoint. It's one of the best examples I've ever seen of an emerging phenomenon in the English language, wherein nouns are used attributively, like adjectives, forming chains. The example here, "US Health Tech Giant Change Healthcare", once we expand the abbreviation, reads as "Proper Adjective, Proper Noun, Common Noun, Common Noun, Common Noun, Proper Noun, Proper Noun", for a total of six nouns in a row, assuming we count "Change Healthcare" as two, which I think is fair. (An argument could be made that it's a single proper noun, or, alternatively, that "Healthcare" is a compound of two lexemes, both nouns. I split the difference and counted words as separated by spaces, which is customary for English-language text.)

Young people are probably going to look at that explanation and go "Yeah, so what?" But English didn't used to _do_ that. We used to have to use *way* more prepositions and adjectives. Not so many decades ago, it would have been written along the lines of "[Company], a large American company that produces technology for medical care, ..." Also, the name of the company would not have been Change Healthcare; something more like "National Medical Technology, Inc." would have been a far more likely name in the twentieth century.

I've been seeing this change building for a while, but it's nice to have a really good solid _long_ example that's not artificially contrived.

Re:

[nightflameauto]

I love this headline, from a purely linguistic standpoint. It's one of the best examples I've ever seen of an emerging phenomenon in the English language, wherein nouns are used attributively, like adjectives, forming chains. The example here, "US Health Tech Giant Change Healthcare", once we expand the abbreviation, reads as "Proper Adjective, Proper Noun, Common Noun, Common Noun, Common Noun, Proper Noun, Proper Noun", for a total of six nouns in a row, assuming we count "Change Healthcare" as two, which I think is fair. (An argument could be made that it's a single proper noun, or, alternatively, that "Healthcare" is a compound of two lexemes, both nouns. I split the difference and counted words as separated by spaces, which is customary for English-language text.) Young people are probably going to look at that explanation and go "Yeah, so what?" But English didn't used to _do_ that. We used to have to use *way* more prepositions and adjectives. Not so many decades ago, it would have been written along the lines of "[Company], a large American company that produces technology for medical care, ..." Also, the name of the company would not have been Change Healthcare; something more like "National Medical Technology, Inc." would have been a far more likely name in the twentieth century. I've been seeing this change building for a while, but it's nice to have a really good solid _long_ example that's not artificially contrived.

Honestly, that headline almost gave me a full-blown aneurism. I kept re-reading it thinking I must be missing something, or some word was misplaced. It took about five tries before it sunk in that "Change Healthcare" was a propper name. In all honestly, I think this is a convergence of what you're talking about with a complete disregard for readability by the authors and editors. Which seems par for the course around here.

Re:

[nevermindme]

Hope and Change Healthcare, We hope you get better on your own while you wait and you will change your opinion of us as soon as you need us to do your requirements of healthcare.

Re:

[OpenSourced]

Well, I came to say that I couldn't make head or tails from the headline for a long time, so I guess that makes me old :-)

Yeah it's bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons....

Basically w're all having a Snow Day. We've been told to log out and power down all laptops and other connected gear until further notice.

There's a ton of people working on it right now.

Note that Change Healthcare is just a small fraction of Optum/UHG, and the Optum side of things appear to be okay and unaffected.

Re:

[Mirnotoriety]

Change Healthcare is now a part of UHG's Optum subsidiary. [fiercehealthcare.com]

Re:

[msk]

Did the parent company force job cuts at Change Healthcare?

Re: Yeah it's bad

[erin.xcv]

Not yet ðY

NIPRm SIPR and BIZ

[bugs2squash]

I know there are closed access "internets" for the military. I'm surprised there is no commercial equivalent for US registered, traceable businesses.

it would have to grow to some size to be useful, but go beyond a simple intranet between businesses that have an existing commercial relationship to include almost any US business that wants to talk strictly to other US businesses but be walled off from the public internet

Re:

[nevermindme]

SWIFT NETWORK is a private discussion and economic transfer network for financial institutions. The worlds spying orgs have committed to only financial regulators doing deep inspections on SWIFT traffic, because the CIA isnt a international bank yet.