UnitedHealth’s problems are not a threat to the broader economy, the largest US health insurer’s CEO told a Senate panel on Wednesday after senators questioned whether the company’s size could pose a systemic threat.Senators grilled Andrew Witty during the first of two scheduled testimonies in front of Congressional panels on the recent cyberattack on UnitedHealth’s technology unit that impacted almost all patients and providers.“Your company let the country down,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyde ...

UnitedHealth’s CEO said the company is still investigating a security failure behind a massive cyberattack.Testifying before the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday (May 1), Andrew Witty said the company has not yet determined why its computer systems were left open to a ransomware gang that crippled the U.S. healthcare system earlier this year.According to a report by Bloomberg News, senators spent two hours questioning Witty about UnitedHealth’s defenses, which were breached when intruders accessed a serve ...

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty testifies before the Senate Finance Committee on Capitol Hill on May 1, 2024 in Washington, DC.In a Wednesday hearing in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty confirmed for the first time that the company paid a $22 million ransom to hackers who breached the systems of its subsidiary Change Healthcare.Change Healthcare provides payment, revenue management and other solutions like e-prescription software.The cyberattack has caused wid ...

UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty revealed new details about the cyberattack on its Change Healthcare unit earlier this year, and said the company has been working around the clock to fully restore its systems following the widespread outages from the attack. In prepared remarks before the Senate Finance Committee on Monday, Witty said the perpetrator of the Feb. 21 hack was a cybercriminal known as Blackcat or ALPHV, confirming earlier reports that the ransomware group had taken credit for the attack. Th ...

UnitedHealth Group chief executive officer Andrew Witty told senators on Wednesday that the company has now enabled multi-factor authentication on all the company’s systems exposed to the internet in response to the recent cyberattack against its subsidiary Change Healthcare.The lack of multi-factor authentication was at the center of the ransomware attack that hit Change Healthcare earlier this year, which impacted pharmacies, hospitals, and doctor’s offices across the United States. Multi-factor authentic ...

In this articleUNHOmar Marques | Lightrocket | Getty ImagesOn a Sunday in early March, Dr. Angeli Maun Akey noticed something peculiar while making payroll for her private practice in Gainesville, Florida: She was missing $19,000.Akey owns and operates a primary care practice that serves around 3,500 patients in the area, many of whom suffer from chronic diseases. She opened in 2000 and manages a staff of nearly 20 people. Over the last two decades, Akey said, her practice and patients have been like an ext ...

UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty will testify before two Congressional committees Wednesday (May 1), addressing the cyberattack that hit the company’s Change Healthcare unit.The Senate hearing is titled “Hacking America’s Health Care: Assessing the Change Healthcare Cyber Attack and What’s Next,” while the House hearing is called “Examining the Change Healthcare Cyberattack.”When announcing the upcoming House hearing, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Subcommi ...

The healthcare insurance and services company posted strong growth numbers, due largely to growth in total premiums, although a cyberattack affected its results.It's still early days in this latest earnings season, but it seems we can already tag one winner in the healthcare sector -- take a bow, UnitedHealth Group (UNH 0.30%).As the season lurched into action, the sprawling healthcare insurer and services provider published its first-quarter results. These not only showed very encouraging growth dynamics i ...

UnitedHealth Group is shutting down its Optum Virtual Care telehealth business.Employees were notified of the shutdown on Thursday (April 18), and some were told that their last day would be in July, Seeking Alpha reported Tuesday (April 24), citing a paywalled article by Endpoints News.Reached for comment by PYMNTS, a UnitedHealth Group spokesperson provided an emailed statement saying that the company will support the affected team members with job placement resources and, wherever possible, deploy them i ...

UnitedHealth says Change hackers stole health data on ‘substantial proportion of people in America’ The health tech giant handles health data for about half of all AmericansHealth insurance giant UnitedHealth Group has confirmed that a ransomware attack on its health tech subsidiary Change Healthcare earlier this year resulted in a huge theft of Americans’ private healthcare data.UnitedHealth said in a statement on Monday that a ransomware gang took files containing personal data and protected health inform ...