Ransomware attack blamed for Change Healthcare outage stalling US prescriptions

TechCrunch reports that Change Healthcare, a major U.S. healthcare technology provider owned by UnitedHealth Group, suffered a widespread ransomware attack beginning February 21 that disrupted pharmacies, hospitals, and billing systems nationwide. The company attributed the incident to the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware group; UnitedHealth also reported a “suspected nation-state” actor in its systems but did not attribute the outage to a government. Change Healthcare took many systems offline to remove attackers, and the outage has impacted prescription processing and pharmacy operations while investigations continue and it is unclear whether patient data was exfiltrated.