Cybersecurity experts have estimated that UnitedHealth Group, the largest health insurer in the US, will need several months to recover fully from the cyberattack by a hacking group called ALPHV, also known as “BlackCat”. The hack, which occurred on February 21st, targeted UnitedHealth’s Change Healthcare unit and has been one of the most disruptive hacks against America’s healthcare infrastructure. UnitedHealth has stated that it is working to restore impacted channels, and some of its systems are returning to normal. However, cybersecurity analysts believe that it will take a while before the company fully recovers, although no timeline has been provided for that so far.
Chester Wisniewski, a director at the cybersecurity firm Sophos, said that “The amount of disruption suggests they don’t have alternate systems at the ready. It’s been 13, 14 days, and that is already longer than I’d expect for backup systems to be spun up.” Change Healthcare processes around 50% of medical claims in the US for roughly 900,000 physicians, 33,000 pharmacies, 5,500 hospitals and 600 laboratories. With about 1 in 3 US patient records touched by its health technology offerings, the company is an attractive target for hackers.
While UnitedHealth’s customers directly impacted may see a fix sooner, the back end may take several months or even upwards of a year to recover fully, said Wisniewski, who has tracked such breaches for over 20 years. A UnitedHealth spokesman said the firm was focused on investigating the hack and restoring operations at Change Healthcare. US officials have also stepped in to help curb the chaos stemming from the breach that has hit smaller medical care providers particularly hard, with many struggling to process payments.
Similar breaches last year against gambling firm MGM Resorts International and consumer products company Clorox impacted them for months, costing MGM at least $100 million in damages and Clorox a drop of more than $350 million in quarterly net sales. Brett Callow, a Canada-based ransomware analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, stated that “Getting everything back to normal can be a multi-month process.”
Although UnitedHealth has not stated if ALPHV demanded ransom, a post on an online cybercrime forum claimed that the company paid $22 million to the hackers for regaining access to its locked systems and around 8 terabytes, or 8 million megabytes, of data that was allegedly stolen. Such decryption can take unreasonable amounts of time, depending on the file sizes and systems in question, said Kurtis Minder, co-founder of cyber intelligence firm GroupSense. Minder, who has helped victimized organizations negotiate with ALPHV, said recovery timelines ranged from a few weeks to “long and longer.” ALPHV has not responded to requests for comment. The US FBI, which typically investigates such matters, declined to comment on the hack.
Months before ALPHV’s most disruptive hack yet, the group was hitting hospitals and small healthcare providers. Minder said he has helped several companies, including an eye care clinic that was an ALPHV target last year, negotiate with the hackers. “Of the groups that we’ve dealt with in ransomware, ALPHV has been some of the more antagonistic or difficult to deal with,” Minder said, adding that the gang was particularly persistent against its targets and stubborn at negotiating ransoms.
Active since at least 2021, the Russian-speaking ALPHV cybercrime gang provides its own malicious software and infrastructure to other hacking outfits and was the world’s second most prolific ‘ransomware-as-a-service’ entity until the FBI disrupted its operations in December. The FBI said at the time it had seized many ALPHV websites and gained insight into its computer network. The Change hack has raised questions about how effective the agency’s actions really were.
In response to the FBI takedown, ALPHV’s administrator instructed its hacking ‘affiliates’ to target hospitals, according to a US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency advisory about the group last week. Of the nearly 70 known ALPHV victims since mid-December, most have been in healthcare, CISA said.
There are some signs ALPHV may be quiet for a while. Following the Change Healthcare hack, the group has pulled a disappearing act. However, analysts say that it is common for such groups to rebrand and resurrect themselves. “In order to truly disrupt these folks, you’d have to arrest them,” said Minder, adding that such arrests are difficult, given that these gangs are often based in countries the US does not have extradition treaties with.