It’s still not clear how many Americans were affected by the cyberattack two months after hackers broke into Change Healthcare systems and stole and then encrypted business data.
CEO of UnitedHealth Group, which owns Change Healthcare, Andrew Witty said last month that the stolen files contain personal health information for “a substantial proportion of people in America.”
At a House meeting on Wednesday, Witty was asked for a more specific answer. When pushed, he said that the breach affected “maybe a third [of Americans] or somewhere on that level.”
Witty said he couldn’t give a more exact answer because the company is still looking into the breach and trying to figure out how many people were affected.
Anthony Marusic, a spokesman for UnitedHealth, did not reply right away to a request for comment on Witty’s estimate.
Before the Senate meeting on Wednesday, Witty said that the company will probably have to wait “several months” before it can start telling people about the data breach.
That was Witty’s written statement before the two hearings. The CEO said, “So far, we have not seen evidence of exfiltration of materials such as doctors’ charts or full medical histories among the data.”
The hackers “used compromised credentials to remotely access a Change Healthcare Citrix portal,” according to Witty’s evidence. This portal wasn’t protected by multi-factor authentication, which is a basic security measure that makes it harder to get into accounts and systems without more than one factor.
The breach might not have happened if multi-factor authentication had been turned on for that site. Several senators questioned Witty about that mistake and asked him if the UnitedHealth and Change Healthcare systems are now safe with multiple forms of identification.
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On the Senate hearing, Witty said, “It is required by policy across the organization that all of our external systems have multi-factor authentication. This is in place.”
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