CA doctors face uncertainty after Change Health Care cyber attack

Cyber attacks on hospitals, schools

When the attack is over, there’s going to be a lot of retrospective thinking about how the largest cyber attack on the health care system in U.S. history could have been prevented, said Amy Chang, a senior fellow at the R Street Institute and former head of cybersecurity operations at JP Morgan based in San Francisco. The attack illustrates the appeal of targeting public-facing institutions like schools, local governments, and hospitals: They make prime targets because they tend to have relatively limited cybersecurity budgets and they provide essential services. Cybersecurity experts refer to them as target rich, resource poor.

The Change Healthcare attack also shows the consequences of consolidating key technologies with a handful of corporations. The attack is similar to the Colonial Pipeline cyber attack of 2021, which shut down multiple gas pipelines and triggered fuel shortages along the east coast of the United States.

“You’re seeing the same kind of cascading effects, if not even more due to this entity that you probably had never even heard of before it actually occurred having these far-reaching ramifications that especially in the healthcare setting end up truly putting lives at risk,” Chang said.