A recent cyberattack to a vital billing and prescribing service operated by a UnitedHealth unit has highlighted the need for the healthcare sector to work with the federal government on ways to mitigate security risks and combat future threats. Doron Goldstein recently spoke to Law360 about the attack for their article “Healthcare Hack May Be Wake-Up Call For Industry And Gov’t”.
A major cyberattack to Change Healthcare’s information technology systems that processes roughly half the medical claims in the U.S has caused a ripple effect of cash flow issues across the healthcare sector. The system is said to take weeks to fully restore. The federal government has quickly stepped in and helped expedite payments and has launched an investigation on wider privacy implications.
The significant impact that this cyberattack has had on the healthcare industry has prompted the question of which entities are considered “critical infrastructure” by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The complex supply chains that sustain each industry can have a causal sequence and could also be considered “critical infrastructure”. Doron Goldstein told law 360, “As our society gets more and more computerized, our sense of what constitutes critical infrastructure has to change as well. This “cascading effect” that the Change Healthcare attack has had on the healthcare system and its ability to effectively operate highlights how a rethink is required about what critical infrastructure is in 2024 and what has to be done to protect it.” Doron adds, “A lot of companies haven’t thought about what’s critical infrastructure to them and what they need to be able to operate. These cyberattacks are going to keep happening, and we as a society have to be better at understanding how we can minimize the damage and respond effectively.”
Doron also noted that cyberattacks are not new to the healthcare industry but the nature and intent of these attacks are changing. “They used to be much more targeted and focused more on how [the hackers] would unlock a system if the company paid them, but now there’s much more exfiltration of data, meaning that even if a company pays to unlock its system, its data may still be out there.”
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For further information, please contact:
Doron S. Goldstein, Partner, Withersworldwide
doron.goldstein@withersworldwide.com
