(Photo by Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty)
A cyberattack at a major US health insurance provider is preventing some pharmacies from filling prescriptions.
In a Thursday stock exchange filing, the parent company of United Healthcare confirmed that a “suspected nation-state” actor had infiltrated a subsidiary.
The parent company, UnitedHealth Group, identified the intrusion on Feb. 21. “Immediately upon detection of this outside threat, the company proactively isolated the impacted systems from other connecting systems in the interest of protecting our partners and patients, to contain, assess and remediate the incident,” it wrote.
Still, the intrusion has caused a major outage at Change Healthcare, which manages a payment platform for pharmacies and hospitals nationwide. The system has been down since Wednesday and ensnared dozens of IT services, according to the company’s status updates.
“The disruption is expected to last at least through the day,” the latest status update says.
(Credit: Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton)As a result, pharmacy workers are reporting troubles processing medical prescriptions for patients. “All the major chains are having this issue. Commiserated with my local pharmacy buddies at Rite Aid and Kroger today while doing transfers. Goodrx as well as several insurances, all down all day,” one user on Reddit wrote.
“This has been the worst day of my job since I started working here and it's not even close. I've had both patients and oncologists getting pissed at me nonstop all day,” another added. Meanwhile, hospitals have posted on social media about delays with processing prescriptions.
“This is impacting all military pharmacies worldwide and some retail pharmacies nationally,” the Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton wrote on its website.
The incident underscores the threat of cyberattacks disrupting the US’s critical infrastructure. UnitedHealth Group didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, so it's unclear if any patient data was stolen. The company’s stock exchange filing merely adds that it’s working to restore all systems “as soon as possible, but cannot estimate the duration or extent of the disruption at this time.”
“The company has retained leading security experts, is working with law enforcement and notified customers, clients and certain government agencies,” the filing says. “At this time, the company believes the network interruption is specific to Change Healthcare systems, and all other systems across the company are operational.”