Payment Platform Breach Could Cost United More than $1B

A healthcare payment processing platform owned by United Healthcare suffered a crippling attack in February that left many small providers and patients without vital services and prescriptions. Now, United has disclosed the staggering cost to fix the problem: somewhere in the range of $1.5 billion. Costs incurred to date (almost $900 million in six weeks) include both response efforts and business losses from taking the platform offline.  

Why It Matters

These numbers are almost unimaginably huge for most small companies, but the reality is that responding to an incident is almost always far more costly than preventing it. Furthermore, the cost of incident response can be disproportionately high for a small company, many of whom are significantly burdened by loss or disruption of business, customer cancellations, or cost of recovery. If a company like United can be hit, rest assured that none of us is immune.  

Subscribe to Taylor English Insights by topic here.