Posted on 03/10/2024 8:20:12 AM PDT by dynachrome
For more than two weeks, a cyberattack has disrupted business at health care providers across the United States, forcing small clinics to scramble to stay in business and exposing the fragility of the billing system that underpins American health care.
“We’re hemorrhaging money,” said Catherine Reinheimer, practice manager at the Foot and Ankle Specialty Center in the suburbs of Philadelphia. “This will probably be the last week that we can keep everybody on full-time without having to do something,” she told CNN. The center is considering taking out a loan to keep the lights on.
The cyberattack disrupted the computer networks of Change Healthcare, which serves thousands of hospitals, insurers and pharmacies nationwide. It prevented some insurance payments on prescription drugs from processing, leaving many care providers footing the bill up front and hoping to get reimbursed.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Most small business use packaged software for billing now. I work with packaged software and the cost and expense to keep billing systems in line with ever-changing government regulations is a crushing burden.
Regarding that packaged software - I wonder how much of its software development was off-shored like to hostile power (e.g, China, Iran, Russia, etc) or a place where the developers could be influenced by hostile powers.
Packaged software is pretty much extinct. Everything is web applications. In this particular case, the billing network provider got hacked and ransomed by the same actors that attacked Caesars and MGM Resorts. The FBI should have destroyed that hacker outfit by now.
This has been going on for several weeks and though it’s hurting the clinics and the drug stores it’s hurting the people more because they can’t get insurance coverage and they have to pay cash for their medications and hope that the insurance will reimburse them in the end.
I’ve heard of some people having to pay up to $1,200 for a life-saving prescription and I’d hate to think what those taking chemo drugs or having to pay.
I think Russia is way ahead of us in cyber warfare.
The United States has been too busy trying to hurt its own citizens.
Here is an article about their current status:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/blackcat-ransomware-group-implodes-after-apparent-22m-ransom-payment-by-change-healthcare/
"There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ALPHV“) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However, the cybercriminal who claims to have given BlackCat access to Change’s network says the crime gang cheated them out of their share of the ransom, and that they still have the sensitive data Change reportedly paid the group to destroy. Meanwhile, the affiliate’s disclosure appears to have prompted BlackCat to cease operations entirely." (see longer article)
I think Russia is way ahead of us in cyber warfare.
The United States has been too busy trying to hurt its own citizens
\/
imho
CISA
helped steal the election in brazil
and here in 2020
and is probably ripe with chinese and russian agents and american communists.
.
Like most Americans, I am currently spending a little more than I make, thanks in part to Joetato and his Dumbocrat and GOPee collaborators in Congress. I still wouldn’t click on those dumb links.
Most of it actually. That is why I would not be sorry to see every undersea cable cut and the garbage ruling class forced to reshore talent.
Just because the snail mail delivery system is pretty much gone that doesn’t preclude the software (i.e, ‘apps’) being developed separately from the distributor. The distributor subcontracts out development. Then sticks his name on it and just sells it through his server.
If the hackers operate on the dark web using a VPN, it’s basically impossible to trace them.
If the hackers seek ransom, using bitcoin they can launder the money making it impossible to track.
The Cyber Domain for companies and government is impossible to 100% secure, someone or some group of people on the inside have Admin or Super User status, if one of those people goes bad, they have the ability to hack anything inside that organization.
Think of Edward Snowden, think of the NSA who had 50 terabytes of information stolen in a hack, the software stolen had all the secret tools that the NSA uses to hack other countries, those tools were released on the Dark Web and have been used against organizations inside the USA.
https://www.idstrong.com/sentinel/the-nsa-hack-what-happened-to-nsa/
If the NSA isn’t secure no one is.
And 50 million of those 100 million medicaid scroungers are flippin’ illegal alien foreigners ILLEGALLY SHACKED UP IN AMERICA MY HOME. The scumbag, DemonRAT Fart Left POS turned America into a “refugeez” internment camp for foreign freeloaders and used taxpayer dollars to renovate a previously used camp into a National Park to rub our noses into OUR FUTURE. FJB and the jackass he rode in on.
“And 50 million of those 100 million medicaid scroungers are flippin’ illegal alien foreigners ILLEGALLY SHACKED UP IN AMERICA MY HOME.”
Not true. Only immigrants with legal status (i.e. green card, with a five year delay) are eligible for Medicaid. Some states provide similar insurance coverage but not Medicaid.
“Wait til they shut down the EBT network”
No incentive. The federal government isn’t going to pay ransom.
> If the NSA isn’t secure no one is.
Including the hackers? You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say the good guys can never be secure, yet the bad guys somehow are invincible. The resources a hacker group can muster are a fraction of what a nation state can do. Is the budget of the FBI not enough to destroy these gangs?
They just built a new Urgent Care right around the corner of my house.
That now makes 3 of them within a 1 mile strip on Rt.1.
I am convinced that the entire business model is to profit from state and federal tax dollars by servicing the illegals that they are now filling up the local hotel and motels in this area.
That’s true, hackers are not secure either, the difference is an NSA type organization is static, a hacker could across the street in a Starbucks, or somewhere on the other side of the world and is probably constantly moving locations making nearly impossible to catch them.
If you haven’t read up on Ross Ulbricht, he ran a Dark Web site called “Silk Road”, which was an Ebay type site where everything under the sun was for sale and payment was made in bitcoin.
His mistake was the Feds finding a website that revealed his identity thru and email from years before and when he was arrested, he was caught in a public library doing admin work on the site.
He got life in prison for his troubles, so no one is safe on the internet, hackers included, sole individuals are much harder to catch.
📌
At the pharmacies, we billed people on programs similar to GoodRX (which was also down) and then were able to rebill insurance properly later; but MPB is still down, and so is Medicaid. Diabetic supplies aren’t being paid for, and neither are vaccines billed under Medicare. That sh¡t is costly, so some are going without testing, which is NOT good.
Sadly, medical facilities don’t have the option we did at pharmacies.
That’s right. Illegals don’t get Medicaid. They are just given free healthcare. Read the signs on the walls of ERs, hospitals and clinics. NO ONE CAN BE REFUSED MEDICAL CARE. The illegals just don’t get the fancy Medicaid card. However, their “anchor babies” get Medicaid and food stamps.
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