UnitedHealth says Change Healthcare was hacked by the nation state as pharmacy outages drag on

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U.S. health insurance giant UnitedHealth Group said in a filing with federal regulators on Thursday that its subsidiary Change Healthcare was likely compromised by state-backed hackers.

In a filing Thursday, UHG blamed suspected federal hackers for the ongoing cybersecurity incident at Change Healthcare, but said there was no time frame for when its systems would be back online.

UHG did not attribute the cyberattack to a specific nation or government or specify what evidence it had to support its claim.

A company spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment at the time of writing.

Change Healthcare provides patient billing across the U.S. healthcare system. The company processes billions of healthcare transactions annually and, according to its own information, manages about one in three US patient records, i.e. around one hundred million Americans.

According to the company's incident tracker, the cyberattack began early Wednesday.

Change Healthcare has not yet disclosed the specific nature of its cyberattack.

Pharmacies across the U.S. report being unable to fill prescriptions through patient insurance due to the ongoing outage at Change Healthcare, which handles much of the billing process.

Several healthcare workers whose jobs are affected by the outage tell TechCrunch they are experiencing downtime due to the ongoing cyberattack.

UHG said in its filing that it “has engaged leading security experts, is cooperating with law enforcement and notifying customers, clients and certain government agencies.”