There was a serious cyber attack on UnitedHealthcare systems on February 21st that severely effected claims processing for hospitals, doctor’s offices, and pharmacies. The criminal group known as BlackCat is thought to be responsible for the attack.
The details of the situation are a bit sketchy but anyone who relies on the degraded systems, especially smaller companies who may not have alternatives, are not able to continue normal operations.
Look at the linked article below from Yahoo Finance. It explains the story in detail and shows a graph from the Identity Theft Resource Center that indicates the number of compromises had gone up quite a bit in 2023 as compared to 2022, but the total number of victims has gone down. This suggests what we have been seeing, an increase in security compromises in small and medium-sized businesses.
This article talks about how larger companies are dealing with the outages with work arounds and alternative systems, but many smaller organizations do not have these work arounds and alternatives in place.
This underscores the importance of planning for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). SMBs should not only be trying to prevent breaches, but also planning how to deal with a breach in their company or in the systems of key partner companies. All of this can be covered in a Written Information Security Plan (WISP).
If you do not have a WISP and would like to discuss it with us, please contact me. I will be glad to talk with you about your IT security, protection, detection, and response plans.
Link to source article from Yahoo Finance
