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For months, Change Healthcare has confronted an immensely messy, months-long ransomware debacle that has left a whole lot of pharmacies and medical practices throughout the US unable to course of claims. Now, because of an obvious dispute inside the ransomware felony ecosystem, it might have simply develop into far messier nonetheless.
Final month, the ransomware group AlphV, which had claimed credit score for encrypting Change Healthcare’s community and threatened to leak reams of the corporate’s delicate well being care information, obtained a $22 million fee—proof, publicly captured on Bitcoin’s blockchain, that Change Healthcare had very doubtless caved to its tormentors’ ransom demand, although the corporate has but to substantiate that it paid. However in a brand new definition of a worst-case ransomware, a totally different ransomware group claims to be holding Change Healthcare’s stolen information and is demanding a fee of their very own.
Since Monday, RansomHub, a comparatively new ransomware group, has posted to its dark-web web site that it has 4 terabytes of Change Healthcare’s stolen information, which it threatened to promote to the “highest bidder” if Change Healthcare didn’t pay an unspecified ransom. RansomHub tells WIRED it isn’t affiliated with AlphV and “can’t say” how a lot it’s demanding as a ransom fee.
RansomHub initially declined to publish or present WIRED any pattern information from that stolen trove to show its declare. However on Friday, a consultant for the group despatched WIRED a number of screenshots of what gave the impression to be affected person information and a data-sharing contract for United Healthcare, which owns Change Healthcare, and Emdeon, which acquired Change Healthcare in 2014 and later took its title.
Whereas WIRED couldn’t absolutely affirm RansomHub’s claims, the samples recommend that this second extortion try in opposition to Change Healthcare could also be greater than an empty menace. “For anybody doubting that we now have the information, and to anybody speculating the criticality and the sensitivity of the information, the pictures must be sufficient to point out the magnitude and significance of the scenario and clear the unrealistic and infantile theories,” the RansomHub contact tells WIRED in an e-mail.
Change Healthcare didn’t instantly reply to WIRED’s request for touch upon RansomHub’s extortion demand.
Brett Callow, a ransomware analyst with safety agency Emsisoft, says he believes AlphV didn’t initially publish any information from the incident, and the origin of RansomHub’s information is unclear. “I clearly do not know whether or not the information is actual—it may have been pulled from elsewhere—however nor do I see something that signifies it might not be genuine,” he says of the information shared by RansomHub.
Jon DiMaggio, chief safety strategist at menace intelligence agency Analyst1, says he believes RansomHub is “telling the reality and does have Change HealthCare’s information,” after reviewing the knowledge despatched to WIRED. Whereas RansomHub is a brand new ransomware menace actor, DiMaggio says, they’re shortly “gaining momentum.”
If RansomHub’s claims are actual, it’ll imply that Change Healthcare’s already catastrophic ransomware ordeal has develop into a form of cautionary story in regards to the risks of trusting ransomware teams to comply with by means of on their guarantees, even after a ransom is paid. In March, somebody who goes by the title “notchy” posted to a Russian cybercriminal discussion board that AlphV had pocketed that $22 million fee and disappeared with out sharing a fee with the “affiliate” hackers who sometimes associate with ransomware teams and sometimes penetrate victims’ networks on their behalf.
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