United Health Centers, located in California, was hit by a ransomware assault that apparently affected all of their facilities and resulted in patient data theft.
United Health Clinics is a California-based health care company with twenty-one community health centres serving Fresno, Kings, and Tulare counties.
On August 31st, BleepingComputer learned from a source in the cybersecurity sector that United Health Centers had been hit by a Vice Society ransomware assault, which forced them to shut down their whole network.
According to our sources, the outage created problems in the IT system for all of their sites, and they have begun to reimage machines and retrieve data from offline backups.
At the time, BleepingComputer contacted UHC several times but received no response to any of our inquiries to confirm the assault.
This week, the Vice Society ransomware group published files allegedly stolen from United Health Centers during the August attack.
According to our sources, the leaked files include sensitive information such as patient benefits, financial records, patient lab results, and audits.
BleepingComputer contacted UHC about the stolen data again yesterday night but did not receive a response.
Furthermore, neither the assault nor the possible exposure of patient data has been mentioned on UHC’s website.
20% of Vice Society’s victims are in healthcare
Vice Society is a relatively recent ransomware operation that began in June 2021, with the healthcare business accounting for 20% of the firms mentioned on their data dump site.
BleepingComputer emailed Vice Society after learning about the assault on United Health Centers to find out why they allow hospitals to be targeted.
Their response to our question is below:
“Why not?
They always keep our private data open. You, me and anyone else go to hospitals, give them our passports, share our health problems etc. and they don’t even try to protect our data. They have billions of government money. Do they steal that money?
USA president gave big amount to protect government networks and where is their protection? Where is our protection?
If IT department don’t want to do their job we will do ours and we don’t care if it hospital or university.” – Vice Society ransomware.
While some ransomware groups ban assaults on hospitals and medical facilities, sadly, a rising number of younger ransomware gangs do not.
