United Health Centers, situated in California, was hit by a ransomware attack that apparently impacted all of their locations and resulted in patient data theft.
United Health Centers is a California-based health care company with twenty-one community health centers serving Fresno, Kings, and Tulare counties.
On August 31st, BleepingComputer learned from a source in the cybersecurity field that UHC had been hit by a Vice Society ransomware attack, 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 locations, and they have begun to reimage systems and restore data from offline backups.
At the time, BleepingComputer contacted UHC several times but received no response to any of our inquiries to confirm the attack.
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This week, the Vice Society ransomware gang shared files allegedly stolen from United Health Centers during the August attack.
According to our sources, the hacked files include sensitive information such as patient benefits, financial papers, patient lab results, and audits.
BleepingComputer contacted UHC about the exposed data again last night but did not receive a response.
Furthermore, neither the incident nor the potential vulnerability of patient data has been published on UHC’s website.
Vice Society is a relatively new ransomware operation that began in June 2021, with the healthcare business accounting for 20% of the companies mentioned on their data dumpsite.
BleepingComputer emailed Vice Society after learning about the attack on United Health Centers to find out why they allow hospitals to be targeted.
While some ransomware organizations limit assaults on hospitals and medical facilities, unfortunately, an increasing number of newer ransomware gangs do not.