Change Healthcare’s ransomware attack costs edge toward $1B so far

UnitedHealth, parent company of ransomware-besieged Change Healthcare, says the total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million. That's on top of the amount in advance funding and interest-free loans UnitedHealth provided to support care providers …

[Paul Crawford]

total costs of tending to the February cyberattack for the first calendar quarter of 2024 currently stands at $872 million

I do wonder how that compares to what they actually spent on security before the attack?

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is that it's approximately $872M more than they previously spent on security.

[Pascal Monett]

I wonder just what level of security you can get for $872 million.

I'm thinking the Board might be well advised to start budgeting a few tens of millions in that direction - because otherwise, there's a good chance that they'll be budgeting another few billion in payouts in not too long.

[Eecahmap]

If it's like my previous employer, then the constant drumbeat was "cut costs" and "switch to Microsoft monoculture".

[Sparkus]

well...

perhaps it's time to break up the Optum mono-culture......

[steviebuk]

It was probably close to $1, if finance where involved. NEVER let finance run IT.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody ever lost money buying MICROS~1 /s

Nobody ever lost money buying MICROS~1 /s

[heyrick]

financially, the total cost of the cyberattack is estimated to be between $shitloads and $fucktons

No, guys, financially it's the cost of poor security practice that allowed this to happen in the first place.

[mikus]

Rase Premiums

Their customers will be the ones to pay for their own stupidity and laziness, not them. They obviously learned nothing after the first, paid the ransom like a fine, and went back to operating poorly. Now they got got again.

Hopefully the CIO and CISO were at least fired as part of this.

[JustAnotherDistro]

And so the internet, designed to be a distributed communications system for resilience, has fostered the concentration of services into utility-scale companies that are massive single points of failure, only completely unregulated.

Capital work, there.

[Version 1.0]

A long time ago

In the years before the Internet, the first computer (the Analytical Engine, created by Charles Babbage in the 19th century) was relatively secure. Hacking one, with our current data storage levels, would probably require about 30 large trucks to carry it away. We have made so many great technological changes since then, but while computing is so much more wonderful, hacking in a few minutes has also appeared.

I'm not saying that hacking is a "feature" ... it's just a result of our technological changes, we just need to revise our technology evolution.