UnitedHealth Group has paid more than $2B to providers following cyberattack

https://www.aol.com/news/unitedhealth-group-paid-more-2-125226015.html

by udev4096 • 2 years ago

95 65 2 years ago

aol.com

gravescale• 2 years ago

Funny how that money wouldn't have been there when someone suggested doing it right in the first place.

Of course the MBAs see this as a win as their names aren't on anything except the profits at the time. Parasites.

kurthr• 2 years ago

This (IT Integrity Charge) will become a line item on your medical bill. All the other providers will follow, prices go up, insurance companies make more money, and "shareholders" see high returns!

natoliniak• 2 years ago

We continue to call on Congress and the Administration to take additional actions now to support providers

ah yeah, the old socializing losses and privatizing profits.

dsr_• 2 years ago

At what point will cybersecurity firms arrange deals with cybercriminal organizations to keep the money flowing?

* protection for our clients

* drum up business for the market as a whole

* make competitors look bad -- especially if they get attacked directly

After all, breaking a window makes money for the glaziers.

qaq4• 2 years ago

cybercriminal organizations pull way more $ than cybersecurity firms do

null0ranje• 2 years ago

Maybe when supply outstrips demand? It looks like there is more than enough business for the foreseeable future that there is no need to restore to protection rackets.

whimsicalism• 2 years ago

this has already happened in a few notable cases with ddos protection providers, it’s basically digital rico

throwup2382• 2 years ago

Cloudflare?

They provide DDoS protection to DDoS providers that would otherwise have taken each other down, so those providers can find clients for their services which further necessitates Cloudflare’s main product.

lebean2• 2 years ago

Wow they must be making millions on this lucrative market, defending DDoS providers from each other. An infinite money glitch!

Aerbil3132• 2 years ago

provide protection to DDoS providers that would otherwise have taken each other down

Given many DDOSs are originated by botnets, is this possible?

htrp• 2 years ago

https://xkcd.com/250/

also I think there was a thing on krebs where a reputation defender company was also operating one of those mugshot search sites

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/03/ceo-of-data-privacy-comp...

costco• 2 years ago

UCEPROTECT has mastered the email blacklisting protection racket. Randomly list IP space on blacklist, force payment for removal, ???, profit.

ixaxaar2• 2 years ago

Good. Also, don't hire good devs, only hire the cheap ones in India.

Money saved can be paid to these providers. That way, the money stays in the us. A 10k IQ move that no one will understand.

/s ov course

qaq4• 2 years ago

It's to a degree orthogonal to devs your hire as well resourced APT will be able to penetrate any org regardless of quality of developers an org hires.

peteradio4• 2 years ago

Inevitably the cause of the breach will be something like an open firewall.

ixaxaar2• 2 years ago

Any org? Would, for example, openai be included in your definition of "any org"?

Look, "in principle" stuff is not how the real world works. AFAIK, hacks happen mostly because of carelessness. No one cares because no one cares if they care (and the compensations etc reflect that). I know enough such cases in fintech (forget about other verticals), which are mostly stupid like wrong RBAC, open firewall, AWS keys taken by roommate etc and not public of course.

nradov3• 2 years ago

There's no evidence that this attack was due to poor UHG developer quality. It appears to have been an infrastructure security vulnerability in the Change Healthcare business unit, which UHG acquired just last year.

peteradio4• 2 years ago

It appears to have been an infrastructure security vulnerability in the Change Healthcare business unit

UHG developers would be responsible for the infrastructure right? And wouldn't Change have been brought under the UHG network?

adventurer• 2 years ago

Pretty sure they aim to outsource 70% going forward so this isn’t as clever a joke as you would hope.

peteradio4• 2 years ago

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it has launched an investigation into the company due to the “unprecedented magnitude of the cyberattack.”

Let the coverup begin, well actually they probably started wiping days after the attack.

briffle• 2 years ago

The 2 old datacenteers are still sitting there with Mandiant doing a full investigation since the attack started.

They have been migrating all their services for that business they bought to the cloud, and have already started turning up several services.

advisedwang• 2 years ago

Would there be less coverup if they didn't investigate?

eli• 2 years ago

To be clear: they haven't "lost" any money here. They probably genuinely owe providers $2B. They just don't know exactly how much until the billing systems are back online, at which point they'll reconcile.

hammock• 2 years ago

Thoughts and prayers to their accounting department

antisthenes• 2 years ago

Thoughts and prayers to the taxpayers, to whom all the costs will be passed down anyway.

jollofricepeas• 2 years ago

Yes.

These are the payments owed by plans.

UnitedHealth is also advancing money to some providers as well.

See: https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/ns/changehealthcare.html

pwizzler• 2 years ago

A drop in the bucket compared to how much they normally transact, but it sounds like good PR.

cellis• 2 years ago

Wow aol is still a thing? Just a news site? Brings me back…

ethbr1• 2 years ago

Noticed this a few years ago too.

Expect there was too much traffic to the domain for the current owner to abandon.

The Wayback machine on it, through the decades, is fascinating if you're curious.

autoexec• 2 years ago

AOL was the Google of its day. It was the internet for most people. Even the strongest giants can fall. It gives me hope for a future where someone asks "Wow Google is still a thing?"

dragonwriter• 2 years ago

It was the internet for most people.

It wasn't, though. It was the largest, but never majority (except that I think it peaked with an absolute majority of CDs pressed by AOL CDs, which was an achievement, I guess.)

FredPret2• 2 years ago

The healthcare market in the US is crazy. UnitedHealth has revenues of $90b per quarter, up from $20B 15 years ago: https://valustox.com/UNH

They only make a 6% margin, but still. That's a ton of cash.

ericmcer• 2 years ago

The health insurance industry makes more money than the oil industry. It isn't a coincidence that most of our taxes go to healthcare and the top grossing industries are all built around it.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

Oil business earns far more profit at far higher profit margins. Exxon alone earns more profit than all managed care organizations (health insurance companies) some years.

Revenue that is 95% paid to vendors and employees is not an interesting statistic, on a company level.

takinola2• 2 years ago

The US has a population of 300 million people. This works out to just $300 per person per quarter (or $1,200 annually). Given almost 20% of the population is over 65 (old people really put up the healthcare cost numbers) and the sophistication of our healthcare system (we have the tech to keep you alive or prolong your life despite pretty hairy stuff happening to you), it is not a very surprising number. The real question is how to afford it all.

drozycki• 2 years ago

Aren't you conflating UnitedHealthcare with the US healthcare industry? Your point still stands, just off by under an order of magnitude.

FredPret2• 2 years ago

Point well taken. Anything US-wide adds up to a lot of money

vidarh• 2 years ago

Consider that you also pay for Medicare and Medicaid, which combined costs as much per capita (not per user) as the UK NHS. US healthcare is extraordinarily expensive.

apyrros• 2 years ago

Trust me it isn’t 6%. United is one of the largest healthcare companies by market cap. They have aggressively acquired physicians under Optum, and use an accounting trick called intercompany eliminations to shuffle profits and skirt the law on the medical loss ratio. https://www.axios.com/2021/07/16/unitedhealth-optum-provider...

refurb• 2 years ago

Last I checked United had 50M people covered by their insurance plans and $400B in revenue. Rough math would be $8,000 per person.

But the revenue is similar to Amazon. They buy something for $100 and sell it for $102. Revenues look high, but just because they are a middleman.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

Actual release from Monday:

https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/newsroom/2024/2024-03-18-u...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39750378)

BillSaysThis• 2 years ago

From the press release, this paragraph is making me hit the exploding head emoji many times:

"To assist care providers whose finances have been disrupted by the cyberattack, the company has advanced more than $2 billion thus far through multiple initiatives. The company recognizes the high level of fragmentation of the U.S. health system can result in uneven experiences, therefore it continues to enhance and expand funding support to make it easier for care providers to access funding help at no cost. To further assist care providers, the company also suspended prior authorizations for most outpatient services and utilization review of inpatient admissions for Medicare Advantage plans."

UnitedHealth Group has paid more than $2B to providers following cyberattack

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