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According to lawyer Sara Goldstein of the law firm BakerHostetler, the Change Healthcare massive attack has caused approximately 120 of the company’s IT products and services to go offline since February 21. This cyber disruption substantially and extensively affects the whole healthcare business, including major companies. The cybercriminals claimed to be from BlackCat/Alphv.
From eligibility checks and prior authorization to pharmacy benefits and claims processing, Change Healthcare, a division of Optum, a UnitedHealth Group company, offers a broad range of vital IT tools to healthcare sector enterprises. The company conducts 15 billion healthcare transactions every year.
The devastating effects of cybercrime
“So the amount, the volume of information that’s transferred to them and that’s transferred out, as well the role that they have in healthcare is tremendous. The impact of this has been substantial,” said Goldstein. She went on to say, “Many healthcare providers cannot process claims, payments, or do patient billing. Without these services and being able to generate revenue, it’s really going to create a precarious financial situation for many healthcare systems and healthcare providers.”
350,000 doctors and 15,000 group medical practices are represented by the Medical Group Management Association, which pushed the US Department of Health and Human Services to “utilize all the tools at its disposal to mitigate these impacts, so medical groups do not have to take drastic actions to remain in operation.” The HHS was told by the MGMA that “guidance, financial resources, enforcement discretion, and more are needed to avoid escalating an already serious situation.”
The downside of large companies consolidation
Goldstein said that organizations with no contractual relationship with Change Healthcare are also affected. She continued, “One thing that is being flagged is about the downside of consolidation of these types of vendors in healthcare. So, that has been a challenge. This is pretty catastrophic.”
Cybercrime affects everyone.
Here is the Goldstein interview from Inforisktoday.com.
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The US government says it would be better for them if you ceased using C or C++ when programming tools. In a recent report, the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) has urged developers to utilize “memory-safe programming languages,” a classification that does not include widely used languages. The recommendation is a step toward “securing the building blocks of cyberspace” and is a component of US President Biden’s cybersecurity plan.
Memory-safety is the defense against flaws and vulnerabilities related to memory access. Examples of this include dangling pointers and buffer overflows. Java’s runtime fault detection checks make it a memory-safe language. Nonetheless, unconstrained pointer arithmetic with direct memory addresses and without bounds checking is supported by both C and C++.
In no particular order, the NSA suggests these memory-safe programming languages

Go
Rust
C#
Swift
Java
Ruby
Python
Delphi/Object Pascal
Ada

According to a 2019 analysis by Microsoft security engineers, memory safety problems were the root cause of almost 70% of security vulnerabilities. In 2020, Google released a similar figure, although this time it was for Chromium browser issues.
The extensive report says, “Experts have identified a few programming languages that both lack traits associated with memory safety and also have high proliferation across critical systems, such as C and C++.”  And the report continues, “Choosing to use memory safe programming languages at the outset, as recommended by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Open-Source Software Security Roadmap is one example of developing software in a secure-by-design manner.”
The 19-page report aims to ensure that small organizations and individuals are not the only ones responsible for cybersecurity. Instead, the onus is on bigger institutions, digital businesses, and ultimately the government. The report seeks to detail what is considered “unsafe” programming languages, namely the use of C and C++.  The Microsoft report says, “We’re not here to debate the pros and cons of programming languages, but it is interesting to see that the report does not suggest a specific language in their place. We are told that there are “dozens of memory-safe programming languages that can — and should — be used.”
Additionally, the paper recommends improving software security metrics. According to ONCD, better measurements let technology providers plan, predict, and address risks before they become an issue.
Featured Image Credit: Paul Buijs; Pexels
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