Explaining Continued Consequences of Cyberattack on a Healthcare Provider
ECE/Khoury Professor Kevin Fu explains why some healthcare providers have still not received claims payments following a cyberattack that occurred this February on medical payment processing provider Change Healthcare and how the continued consequences represent a need for government scrutiny on monopolization.
This article originally appeared on Northeastern Global News. It was published by Cesareo Contreras. Main photo: Medical providers are still waiting to get paid after a cyberattack on Change Healthcare in February. Getty Images
Why are medical providers still struggling to get paid seven months after the Change Healthcare’s cyberattack?
Medical providers are still waiting on tens of thousands of dollars in claims payments nearly seven months after hackers infiltrated one of the country’s largest medical payment processing providers.
That provider is Change Healthcare, which in February shared that it had been subjected to a cyberattack.
Northeastern professor Kevin Fu says companies need to do a much better job in building resilience to cyberattacks. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
New reporting from The Wall Street Journal highlights how some health care providers are still picking up the pieces, with many owed payments for claims issued as far back as the month of the attack.
Kevin Fu, a Northeastern College of Engineering professor, isn’t surprised that the fallout continues, and highlighted the need for more government scrutiny.
“These are the kinds of stories the public is going to hear again and again until the industry begins to think about how we remain resilient to cybersecurity threats, rather than just ‘You know, trust us. We’re reliable.’”
Northeastern Global News talked to Fu about the situation.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Q1: Why are medical providers still feeling the impact of an attack that happened almost seven months ago?
We don’t know. Change Healthcare has been fairly quiet on the details. They used to update the website on a daily basis, and they stopped doing that. But my guess is that they probably had a system that depended on some insecure method of communication, and they likely turned that off as a remediation, and now they are scrambling to find a new way to do it. … It’s the sort of dirty business of plumbing for health care. It’s sort of out of sight and out of mind. Sometimes, your septic overflows, and that is pretty much what is happening here.
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