How the ransomware attack at Change Healthcare went down – a timeline


A ransomware attack earlier this year on UnitedHealth-owned health tech company Change Healthcare likely stands as one of the largest data breaches of U.S. health and medical data in history.

Months after the February data breach, a “substantial proportion of people living in America” are receiving notice by mail that their personal and health information was stolen by cybercriminals during the cyberattack on Change Healthcare. At least 100 million people are now known to be affected by the breach. Change Healthcare processes billing and insurance for hundreds of thousands of hospitals, pharmacies and medical practices across the U.S. healthcare sector. As such, it collects and stores vast amounts of highly sensitive medical data on patients in the United States.

Read more…
Source: TechCrunch


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • 13.3 million people’s medical data exposed; companies pay $300,000

    November 9, 2026

    The New York attorney general (AG) has reached a settlement over a medical data breach that affected 13.3 million people after basic security failures. Perry Johnson & Associates (PJ&A) and four related companies have agreed to pay $300,000 and implement extensive security reforms following a breach that exposed personal and medical information belonging to more than ...

  • US Government partners urge hardening industrial refrigeration and cold chain monitoring systems

    November 5, 2026

    The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Health and Human Services (HHS), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and the Department of Transportation (DoT)—hereafter referred to as “the authoring organizations”—are aware of malicious cyber activity targeting industrial refrigeration and cold chain monitoring systems globally. Organizations in the Healthcare and Public Health, ...

  • Cyberattack targets French blood banks

    November 4, 2026

    A cyberattack on several French blood banks sought to raise temperatures to extremely high levels but was thwarted before it could do any damage to blood products or samples, authorities said. The incident comes after supermarkets in a number of European countries reported this week that their fridges and freezers warmed up after they were ...

  • Patient records exposed in Quest breach

    October 26, 2026

    Quest Diagnostics has confirmed that an unauthorized party accessed a system healthcare providers use to order laboratory tests and view results, affecting personal information and patient records. Quest is a major US laboratory testing company whose services help healthcare professionals diagnose and monitor medical conditions. Those services range from routine laboratory testing to specialized testing in ...

  • Medical records giant Epic pauses product development to fix security bugs that risk patients’ data

    October 2, 2026

    Epic, the software technology giant that makes the widely used MyChart software for accessing patients’ medical data, has paused most of its product development as the company works to protect its software and systems from cyberattacks. Judy Faulkner, the founder and chief executive of Epic, told Modern Healthcare last month that the pause would likely last ...

  • Australia: Rogue AI agents worked together for months to gain access to government health data

    September 24, 2026

    A swarm of OpenAI rogue AI agents appear to have gone on a spree of trying to access Australian government health data, in what some researchers say is the first autonomous hack of a government website. Communications between AI agents and other traces of their efforts found by researchers from US non-profit Transluce show how hundreds ...