February ransomware attack continues to impact VA

A ransomware attack in February that disrupted healthcare systems nationwide continues to impact the Department of Veterans Affairs.

And those impacts could continue until next February, officials said during VA Secretary Denis McDonough’s monthly press conference on June 25 in Washington, D.C.

"There remain no known adverse patient events, and there's no known impact to patients,” Veterans Health Administration Executive Director for Strategic Investment Management Ian Komorowski said. “Our care to veterans remains active both at our VHA facilities and through our community care providers,"

The Feb. 21 ransomware attack on Change Healthcare, a subsidiary of United Healthcare, led VHA to stop sending out and receiving billing, prescription and other information from third-party providers and others.

Komorowski said the system wasn’t fully back up until last month, which caused backlogs of more than one million prescription claims and six million invoices. The prescription backlog is expected to be resolved by August and prescription payments by October.

The attack also disrupted VA payments to Optum and TriWest, which administer its community care programs

“Those two administrators, who generally split up the five regions that we have, were able to make payments to providers throughout,” McDonough said.

The cause of the attack has not been determined, but VA is being more vigilant about its cybersecurity training, McDonough said.

“I can cop to the fact that I failed a phishing test last week, so shame on me,” he said. “But the constant, very regular, unannounced training challenges for each of us are really important. We’ve been really vigilant about multifactor authentication at VA. This looks like a very elaborate attack, and it just underscores the fact that not only is this a very complex and high-risk environment, but there are a lot of very highly-capable nefarious actors in the space. So we’ve got to be using all the tools available to us.”

Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com .