UnitedHealthcare is a well-known and widespread insurance company in the United States. The company helps provide insurance plans to more than 8 million individuals overall. With so much stored data held in the company's databases, the recent breach put a large number of people at risk.
The UnitedHealthcare data breach was possible because its broker platform became exposed through an IT vulnerability or because of another potential issue. Once the broker platform was vulnerable one or more individuals took advantage of that vulnerability to access confidential information.
On December 29, 2022, UnitedHealthcare first discovered there was a potential data breach. On February 3, 2023, UHC confirmed an individual had gotten into its files, and after a complete investigation, the overall timeline for the breach was determined to be from December 1, 2022, to January 25, 2023.
This UnitedHealthcare breach impacts customers relying on insurance to help pay for their medical needs. A large number of health insurance customers had their data stolen and they could be at risk for phishing attacks and other potential issues.
We have no data concerning the number of UHC files that were stolen during this data breach. We suspect tens or hundreds of thousands of files were involved in the breach, but nothing is on record for it.