
Medical debt collection firm R1 RCM hit in ransomware attack - todsacerdoti
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/08/medical-debt-collection-firm-r1-rcm-hit-in-ransomware-attack/
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suby
I'm not about to say that this is good, but I have no sympathy here. The fact
that this company exists is a major failing of our society. $1.18 billion in
revenue 2019 alone.

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weaksauce
> I'm not about to say that this is good

yeah the fact that this company exists and is making a lot of money doing it
and likely has an undue influence in how our laws are made makes me shed not a
single tear.

I am only waiting to see if they have backups for their data; if they do i
will shed one.

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lotsofpulp
> yeah the fact that this company exists and is making a lot of money doing it
> and likely has an undue influence in how our laws are made makes me shed not
> a single tear.

I don’t think so. There is a huge undercurrent of government is bad in the US
that can be seen in the voting records of the population, and I believe it’s a
fundamental issue of people being tribal and not wanting “their” tribe’s
resources to benefit another’s tribe.

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TheAdamAndChe
That undercurrent of "government is bad" doesn't come from nowhere. It comes
largely from Fox News, which has advertisers that benefit from this message.
It comes from our politicians who accept bribes to drive legislation. It comes
from a general distrust of the government because of mismanagement.

~~~
majormajor
It's much older than Fox News and also has plenty of racial origins.

A lot of people fought very hard for a century to try to prevent national
government from being able to tell them they couldn't have slaves.

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nelsondev
The history goes farther back than the Civil War, and I don’t see strong
evidence that it’s always racial in its origins.

A lot of immigrants, both recent and historical, came to the USA because they
didn’t like the government in their home country, Pilgrims as a key example,
Falun Gong members leaving China as a more recent example.

The general distrust of a strong government is still part of American culture.

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yardie
This could not have happened to a more deserving company. I take no comfort in
this happening to them, yet I have no sympathy for a company who preys on
people at their most vulnerable moment. Judge away!

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arcticbull
Man, I wish I could be saddened by this news but the tears just aren't coming.

A business built on extracting money from the poor _and_ sick? I guess
sometimes bad things happen to bad people. Socialized medicine can't come soon
enough.

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TedDoesntTalk
But look who else is at risk:

> The company has access to a wealth of personal, financial and medical
> information on _tens of millions_ of patients, including names, dates of
> birth, Social Security numbers, billing information and medical diagnostic
> data.

If the threat actors choose to release the data, then you may be doxed

In that way, it resembles the Equifax breach.

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creaghpatr
Yup, this is the real tragedy. Medical billing companies have the PHI and the
Payment info making them a double whammy for hackers.

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rdtwo
I hope they pay and don’t get their data back

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jonplackett
I hope it's a disgruntled former 'customer'

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arbitrage
I hope it's an act of god or a prexisting condition, and their insurance
carrier refuses to pay out.

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function_seven
“Your insurance covers removal of the malware. However, recovery of your data
is an _elective_ procedure, which is not covered”

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exdsq
Fingers crossed they don't pay and end up losing their data.

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ExpiredLink
Is it related to this viral story?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiLjTMVMkrg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiLjTMVMkrg)

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sschueller
Hey maybe this is one those where the encryption part of the code is messed up
because some script kiddy copy pasted code and decryption is impossible...

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TheRealSteel
Damn, it must be so hard for them, having some evil organization demand a huge
payment for something bad that happened to them that wasn't their fault.

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m0xte
Indeed. However I get the feeling people will just be paying more for this in
overheads and fees now.

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Nasrudith
I doubt it would make much of a difference. Medical billing is from the
service provider not wanting/able to wait for the bill and wanting payment
"now" so they take a sharp haircut. The ammount they can sell it for depends
upon what they can recoup on average. Sometimes it if they waited one more
week the seller would have gotten 100% instead of say 35%. Other times the
delinquient debt is already worth nothing as the patient turns out to be a
dead homeless person - lump it into the averages and move on.

Looking at it in an abstracted way the incompetence of the end user doesn't
devalue the base product beyond the loss of them as a customer in the market.
That a batch became 0% recoverable because of a screw up says nothing of the
collection rate of the provider any more than the fact refrigerated food rots
if left unrefrigerated for 24 hours.

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kingkawn
Good

