Change Healthcare attack sheds light on industry's weak points

was a wake-up call for a health care system that's now racing to safeguard itself against another industry-rattling hack.There's recently been increased focused on defending individual health care organizations against bad actors as the vulnerable sectorBut the Change Healthcare hack that disrupted payments to providers for weeks revealed the industry's heavy reliance on just a few technology companies to keep day-to-day operations running.

"There are some of these pieces of software that have just been consolidated over and over and over, and it turns out like 50,000 pharmacies, usually within hospitals, use the same piece of software," said Kyle Hanslovan, CEO of cybersecurity firm Huntress. That was the case for Children's National, which discovered that some insurers it worked with have exclusive relationships with Change Healthcare and wouldn't allow for claims to be submitted through any other vendor.

"It made it very difficult for people to just say 'OK, let me bounce everything through somewhere else,'" Gordon said.the federal government quickly needs to do a sectorwide accounting to understand where health care's biggest systemic cyber risks are and address them — before hackers beat them to it.

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