Change Healthcare Cyberattack Exposes Data of 190 Million People in Largest U.S. Health Data Breach

The cyberattack on Change Healthcare, first detected in February 2024, has grown into what appears to be the single largest exposure of personal health data in American history.

UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of Change Healthcare, has estimated that approximately 190 million people were affected by the breach, a figure that dwarfs every prior federal data incident on record.

The scale of the compromise, the simplicity of the initial intrusion, and the cascading disruption to medical billing and pharmacy systems across the country have forced a reckoning over how the nation's largest health conglomerate secures the data of more than half the U.S. population.