Connect with us

Technology

UnitedHealth says Blackcat is the reason healthcare providers are going unpaid

Published

on

UnitedHealth says Blackcat is the reason healthcare providers are going unpaid

Health insurance provider UnitedHealth has identified Blackcat as the group behind a debilitating cyber attack that has disrupted healthcare providers nationwide, Reuters is reporting. The attack has led to more than a week-long outage of the the United-owned Change Healthcare system, disrupting payments at hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies across the nation.

Since Change Healthcare acts as a middleman between healthcare providers and insurance companies, the breach has hindered everyday transactions like electronic pharmacy refills and new insurance claims. The company first identified suspicious activity on its IT systems on February 21st, according to an SEC filing.

The breach could last for weeks, UnitedHealth Group Chief Operating Officer Dirk McMahon told STAT. The insurance company is setting up a loan program for healthcare providers in the meantime.

In a joint cybersecurity advisory, federal agencies including CISA and the FBI warned that Blackcat is now intentionally targeting the healthcare system. “Since mid-December 2023, of the nearly 70 leaked victims, the healthcare sector has been the most commonly victimized,” the agencies wrote.

The US government has even offered a combined $15 million reward for any actionable intelligence on the group’s whereabouts. An attempt by the FBI to seize Blackcat’s servers and sites last year seemingly failed —the group quickly regained control.

Advertisement

In a darknet message that was later deleted on Wednesday, Blackcat also claimed it stole millions of patient records, including sensitive medical and insurance data in the UnitedHealth breach, Reuters reported. The group also admitted, in the same message, to stealing data from Medicare, the military medical agency Tricare, and even CVS Health. No further details were provided about the timing of these breaches, and the message was reportedly deleted without explanation. Reuters was unable to reach the hackers or verify any of their claims.

Even the theft of sensitive records from UnitedHealth alone could impact millions of people. Change Healthcare handles nearly 1 in 3 patient records in the US, the American Hospital Association told HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in a letter sent on Monday. “Any prolonged disruption of Change Healthcare’s systems will negatively impact many hospitals’ ability to offer the full set of health care services to their communities,” wrote AHA president Richard J. Pollack.

UnitedHealth is currently working with Google-owned Mandiant and cybersecurity software vendor Palo Alto Networks, CNBC reports. The company hasn’t indicated whether it plans to pay the ransom.

Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Technology

Amazon.com says things are fixed after some issues with logging in and checking out

Published

on

Amazon.com says things are fixed after some issues with logging in and checking out

If you were having issues shopping on Amazon or loading your playlists on Amazon Music on Thursday, you weren’t alone. For over three hours today, Downdetector showed a sizable spike in people reporting issues with checkout, search, and logging in. The problem seemed to be affecting both the site and the mobile apps. But an Amazon spokesperson tells The Verge that the issues are now fixed.

“We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant says in a statement. “We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and website and app are now running smoothly.”

Several Verge staffers experienced issues themselves when there were problems. Clicking through to many products produced a “sorry, something went wrong” error, and even pages that did load were not showing pricing. Users reported being repeatedly logged out of their accounts when trying to check out or load their cart. Even the parts of Amazon.com that were working seem to be loading slowly.

The company has been dealing with AWS outages in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates due to drone strikes by the Iranian military, but there has not been any word of more widespread outages in the US or elsewhere.

Update March 5th: Added comment from Amazon saying that things are fixed.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Technology

$163K in fake medical bill charges; AI uncovers it for you

Published

on

3K in fake medical bill charges; AI uncovers it for you

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

Last summer, a man’s brother-in-law suffered a fatal heart attack. The hospital bill for four hours of emergency care: $195,628.

The man’s sister-in-law was ready to pay it. He asked her to wait. He requested an itemized bill with CPT codes, the universal billing codes hospitals use, and fed the whole thing into Claude, an AI chatbot.

Within minutes, Claude found duplicate charges, services billed as “inpatient” even though the patient was never admitted, supply costs inflated by 500% to 2,300% above Medicare rates and charges for procedures that never happened. He cross-checked with ChatGPT. Both AIs agreed. He wrote a six-page letter citing every violation by name.

The hospital dropped the bill to $33,000. An 83% reduction. Zero medical training. A $20 app.

Advertisement

A man cross-checked a hospital bill with AI and got it reduced by some 83%. (Neil Godwin/Getty Images)

Your bill is probably wrong, too

That story sounds extreme. It’s not.

The Medical Billing Advocates of America estimates 3 out of 4 medical bills contain errors. The average hospital bill over $10,000 has roughly $1,300 in mistakes. And less than 1% of denied insurance claims are ever appealed. Hospitals and insurers are banking on the fact that you won’t check.

AI flips that equation. You don’t need to understand CPT codes or have a medical billing degree. You just need to paste.

You can use AI platforms, like ChatGPT, to spot errors or suspicious charges on medical bills. (Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Advertisement

The 5-minute audit

Step 1: Call your provider and request an itemized bill with CPT codes. Not the summary. The full line-by-line breakdown. You’re legally entitled to this.

Step 2: Open ChatGPT, Claude, Grok or Gemini (free versions work) and paste this:

“I’m pasting my itemized medical bill below. Please: (1) Explain every charge in plain English, (2) Flag any duplicate or suspicious charges, (3) Compare each charge to average costs, (4) Identify billing code errors or bundling violations, and (5) Draft a dispute letter I can send to the billing department. Here’s my bill:”

Step 3: Paste your bill. The AI will translate every line and tell you what looks wrong.

WOMAN SAYS CHATGPT SAVED HER LIFE BY HELPING DETECT CANCER, WHICH DOCTORS MISSED

Advertisement

If the AI finds errors, call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. (iStock)

Step 4: If the AI finds errors (it probably will), call the billing department and ask for a supervisor. Reference the specific codes. Hospitals resolve disputes all the time when patients show up prepared.

Pro tip: Counterforce Health (counterforcehealth.org) is a free AI tool built specifically for insurance denial appeals. Worth bookmarking.

It’s time to give your medical bills a thorough examination. The AI will see you now.

Real talk. Everybody’s talking about AI. Nobody’s showing you what to actually DO with it. My new free newsletter, Splash of AI (SplashofAI.com), gives you one trick, one tool and one “wait, I can do THAT?” moment every single week. Five minutes. Plain English. The kind of stuff that saves you time, money or both. You’ll wonder how you got by without it.

Advertisement

Send this to someone who is staring at a medical bill they can’t make sense of. Forward this right now. Seriously. This could save them hundreds or even thousands of dollars, and it takes less time than making coffee.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Get tech-smarter. Starting today.

Kim Komando cuts through the tech noise so you don’t have to. Real advice. Zero jargon. Every single day.

Catch the national radio show on 500-plus stations, get the free daily newsletter, watch on YouTube or listen to the podcast wherever you get your shows. It’s all waiting at Komando.com.

Copyright 2026, WestStar Multimedia Entertainment. All rights reserved.

Advertisement

Related Article

ChatGPT could miss your serious medical emergency, new study suggests
Continue Reading

Technology

Meta’s AI glasses reportedly send sensitive footage to human reviewers in Kenya

Published

on

Meta’s AI glasses reportedly send sensitive footage to human reviewers in Kenya

Meta’s AI-powered smart glasses could be sending sensitive footage to human reviewers in Nairobi, Kenya, according to an investigation by the Swedish outlets Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten. The report, which was published last week, claims Meta contractors in Kenya have seen videos captured with the smart glasses that show “bathroom visits, sex and other intimate moments.”

So far, at least one proposed class action lawsuit accusing Meta of violating false advertising and privacy laws has emerged in response to Svenska Dagbladet’s reporting, citing the company’s claim that its smart glasses are designed for privacy:

By affirmatively claiming that the Glasses were designed to protect privacy, Meta assumed a duty to disclose material facts that would inform a reasonable consumer’s decision to purchase the product. Instead, Meta hid the alarming reality: that use of the AI features results in a stranger halfway around the world watching the most private moments of a person’s life.

The Nairobi-based contractors interviewed by Svenska Dagbladet are AI annotators, meaning they label images, text, or audio, with the goal of helping AI systems make sense of the data they’re training on. “We see everything — from living rooms to naked bodies,” one worker says, according to Svenska Dagbladet. “Meta has that type of content in its databases.”

A former Meta employee reportedly tells Svenska Dagbladet that faces in annotation data are blurred automatically, though workers in Kenya say this “does not always work as intended,” and some faces are still visible. Another person reportedly tells the outlet that a wearer’s bank cards are sometimes seen in the footage they review as well.

Meta’s Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses come with a built-in AI assistant capable of answering questions about what a user can see. The glasses have soared in popularity in recent years, despite growing concerns over privacy and surveillance.

Advertisement

EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear giant that Meta works with to develop the camera-equipped glasses, sold over 7 million of the AI-powered glasses in 2025 — more than tripling its sales in 2023 and 2024 combined. Last year, Meta made some changes to its privacy policy that keep Meta AI with camera use enabled on your glasses “unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta.’” It also stopped allowing wearers to opt out of storing their voice recordings in the cloud.

As reported by Svenska Dagbladet, the Kenya-based AI reviewers work with transcriptions as well, ensuring Meta AI provides the correct answer to the questions users ask aloud. In a statement to The Verge, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton says media captured by its smart glasses “stays on the user’s device” unless they choose to share it with other people or Meta.

“When people share content with Meta AI, we sometimes use contractors to review this data for the purpose of improving people’s experience, as many other companies do,” Clayton says. “We take steps to filter this data to protect people’s privacy and to help prevent identifying information from being reviewed.”

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending