UnitedHealth subsidiary Optum hack linked to BlackCat ransomware

A cyberattack on UnitedHealth Group subsidiary Optum that led to an ongoing outage impacting the Change Healthcare payment exchange platform was linked to the BlackCat ransomware group by sources familiar with the investigation. Change Healthcare warned customers on Wednesday that some of its services are offline because of a cybersecurity incident. One day later, UnitedHealth Group said in an SEC 8-K filing that the cyberattack was coordinated by suspected "nation-state" hackers who gained access to Change Healthcare's IT systems. The Change Healthcare shutdown has led to widespread billing outages since the platform is widely used across the U.S. healthcare system by electronic health record (EHR), payment processing, care coordination, and data analytics systems in hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies. Since then, Optum has been providing daily incident updates on a dedicated status page, warning that Change Healthcare's systems are still offline to prevent further impact and contain the breach, with the outage currently impacting most services. "We have a high-level of confidence that Optum, UnitedHealthcare and UnitedHealth Group systems have not been affected by this issue," Optum says. "We are working on multiple approaches to restore the impacted environment and will not take any shortcuts or take any additional risk as we bring our systems back online." Since the attack hit its systems, ChangeHealthcare has been conducting Zoom calls with partners in the healthcare in...