UnitedHealth says data of 100M stolen in Change Healthcare hack
bleepingcomputer.com
bleepingcomputer.com
There is no competition in the marketplace. We need to either nationalize them or break them up. These ransomware groups are small-time compared to a nation-state adversary in wartime. At this point it's a national security issue.
"Change Healthcare Inc. (known as Emdeon before rebranding in 2015, which followed its acquisition of Change Healthcare) is a provider of revenue and payment cycle management that connects payers, providers, and patients within the U.S. healthcare system. The name also refers to a company founded in 2007 which subsequently became part of the current conglomerate." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_Healthcare
Of course, those prices will creep up eventually, once the causal link between the consolidation and the market power has been sufficiently obscured. Look at "inflation" - every business was able to blame "supply chain issues" (that they caused by removing redundancies) during COVID to extract unthinkable price increases out of the public. Because every business has only two or three real competitors, all of whom have extreme levels of class discipline and will agree to lie their asses off to the public.
This level of consolidation was allowed because your politicians stabbed you in the back in the name of the """free""" market.
Are you implying there were no supply chain difficulties? China wasn't under heavy lockdown for months on end? There weren't ports with months of backlog? Factories weren't closed due to lockdowns or outbreaks all around the world? That civilian aviation ground to almost a complete halt for a few months, and the cargo it used to carry now didn't need to find an alternative route?
Anyone trying to pin a singular reason for the inflation spikes after Covid is at best misinformed and arguing in bad faith. Covid wrecked supply chains, Russia's invasion of Ukraine wrecked a number of important raw materials' markets (oil, gas, nickel, grain, etc), the Houthis' shenanigans impacted the Suez Canal, droughts impacted the Panama canal. Sprinkle a heavy dose corporate greed and voilà, inflation.
> Food producers including Kraft Heinz realized their own profit surges. The war in Ukraine rocked global grain supplies and fertilizer prices, significantly increasing the cost of food, which remains sticky.
Funny, in both cases external causes made the global prices go up, so specific companies used the opportunity to increase their prices because there was less competition on the market.
actual article:
>A joint study by think tanks IPPR and Common Wealth found profiteering by some of the world’s biggest companies forced prices up significantly higher than costs during 2022.
>[...]
>While this obviously contributed to rising prices, the report finds that company profits increased at a much faster rate than costs did, in a process often dubbed “greedflation.”
Where's the "lying"?
I don’t break out my household expenses when I negotiate pay at a new employer.
You, being a free market enthusiast, decide to test how much the market will bear, and raise your prices across the board.
Your customers, who are also your neighbors and friends, respond by socially ostracizing you.
This doesn’t exist at scale, because the people responsible for the unnecessary price hikes live far away from their customers, and do not intend to ever meet them, much less explain themselves.
People should price products to make a fair profit, one where both parties are satisfied. I don’t begrudge a car salesperson for selling me a car at above their cost, but I do if it’s wildly marked up.
Of course, if I am selling services or goods with lots of repeat business, it might behoove me to not piss off the customers and hence incentivize me to keep my price lower (which is still optimizing for the most money I think I can get, just over the long term rather than short term). If I am selling land or a business, then I am maximizing for that specific transaction, even if my profit margin is 100,000%.
When you get a job offer, and you respond back with a request for an additional $20k per year or whatever, that is doing the same thing.
> make a fair profit
What is fair is an opinion. For people living in huts, a 1,000 sq ft Soviet style apartment bloc with plumbing is unfair. And for people living in Soviet style apartment blocs, a modern 5 over 1 apartment building is unfair. And then you might find a detached single family home unfair. And then you might find a 3k sq ft home unfair.
And so on and so forth.
I think they were more stating that consolidation, which often results in a reduction in redundancies in the system, made the supply chain issues worse than they otherwise would have been. Consolidation can increase the instances of single points of failure.
For a smaller scale example: in 2016 flooding took a biscuit factory out of action for a time, and suddenly you couldn't get bourbon biscuits (and a few other varieties) anywhere. It turns out that all the UK supermarkets (except Sainsbury IIRC) and some big-name brands were supplied by that one factory¹, so they all had a stoppage of supply at the same time, and those being supplied from elsewhere were out of stock too because the remaining smaller supplies could not ramp up production to meet the new demand². The consolidation that brings more efficiency when all is well can make things worse when something goes wrong.
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[1] This also lead to “I told you so” comments from some of us, to people who were suddenly asking “if the ones I buy come from the same place, exactly the same production line, why have I been paying 25p/pack more for them?”.
[2] And even if they could, it would have been a bad business decision because once that big factory was back online the market wouldn't bare the new excess of supply meaning prices would drop, potentially below cost where margins are tight.
[0]: https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/hipaa/hipaa-vio...
At first, I didn't even know who Change was - they're well in the bowels of the stack.
Usual free credit monitoring etc.
And if they are enabled ? Do you think this will make any difference ? We have, at work (Microsoft) 2FA enabled with Windows Hello. At setup it wanted to set a numeric pin. That's all. It asks from time to time about the second factor (Microsoft Authenticator) and that's all.
Am I reading that ransom payout correctly? Or are "losses" divided among other things?
TLDR Qubes OS is a security focused operating system that is geared towards end users. It relies on isolation via the Xen hypervisor (has much less privileged code than Linux, Windows, or Mac kernels), and uses hardware based virtualization features of the CPU as well. E.g. it prevents a compromised network card from accessing the memory of a trusted virtual machine through DMA attacks as an example
And ultimately it incorporates this isolation into a seamless user interface as well
I'm guessing the primary feature that would protect against ransomware is that it allows on to open suspicious links in disposable VMs
* These days hackers have a lot of resources and are often nation state actors. They utilize 0 day vulnerabilities. I don't see how an obscure OS will do any better than mainstream OS in terms of detecting and responding to exploits
* Many hacks actually start with social engineering, and human becomes the weakest point (well, in some sense, it always has been)
* Users, most of which are not computer experts, could make more mistakes when they are faced with software/interfaces they are not familiar with. (I'm just making this up, happy to see data that says otherwise.) "Open suspicious links in disposable VMs"? Sure, if they have received enough training and can do it perfectly, every single time, and never confuse the VM and the host environment. I'd say "never open suspicious links, forward the email to IT to help with you if needed", or even, just filtering untrusted domains in the email, is a much simpler and effective approach.
"Open suspicious links in disposable VMs" change that to "Open all links using the appropriate process"
But yeah, the social engineering though...
It’s great for security, but useless from a productivity standpoint.
"Privacy matters to Change Healthcare, so we follow a privacy framework that helps us to manage and protect your personal information in the products and services we provide."
I guess this speaks for itself. /s