In fact, ransomware attacks on health care targets were on the rise even before the Change Healthcare attack, which crippled the United Healthcare subsidiary’s ability to process insurance payments on behalf of its health care provider clients starting in February of this year. Recorded Future’s Liska points out that every month of 2024 has seen more health care ransomware attacks than the same month in any previous year that he’s tracked. (While this May’s 32 health care attacks is lower than May 2023’s 33, Liska says he expects the more recent number to rise as other incidents continue to come to light.)
Yet Liska still points to the April spike visible in Recorded Future’s data in particular as a likely follow-on effect of Change’s debacleânot only the outsize ransom that Change paid to AlphV, but also the highly visible disruption that the attack caused. âBecause these…
