100 million people affected by the largest health data breach in history

Still worst medical data leak occurred in 2015, affecting 78.8 million people. But the stakes have been raised.

The cyberattack in question reached a new record of 100 million people affected, and it just so happened to affect the world’s largest healthcare company (by revenue), UnitedHealth Group.

The actual incident occurred in February 2024, when a ransomware attack caused outages at pharmacies across the country, as originally reported by Reuters. The target was Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group that manages the finances of health care providers. Cybercriminals reportedly broke into Change Healthcare employees’ systems due to a lack of multi-factor authentication in their login credentials.

A statement from the U.S. Senate Finance Committee described the horrific results of the hack: prescriptions were not filled, doctors and hospitals were not paid, and insurance companies were unable to reimburse health care providers. “The Change Healthcare hack is widely considered to be the largest health care cybersecurity breach in American history,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in a committee statement.

About a third of all American citizens are associated with this organization in some way, and this includes a huge amount of personal data. We all knew it was bad at the time, as Change Healthcare’s CEO said the stolen files included the personal health data of “a significant portion of people in the United States,” TechCrunch reported.

The attack is said to have been carried out by the BlackCat ransomware gang, which was confirmed by Change Healthcare. A post on the Russian group’s dark web later claimed that they had stolen the health and patient information of millions of Americans.

But now the US Department of Health and Human Services has updated the number of victims on its data breach portal to show how bad it really is: a terrifying 100 million people. One trade magazine even suggested that the 100 million figure could change in the future, reports DailyMail. Hopefully this means the actual number could be lower, but it could just as easily go in the opposite direction.

The magnitude does A data breach of 5.3 million people that affected the Mexican healthcare system was reported yesterday seems insignificant in comparison.