Health insurer Point32Health suffers technical outage due to ransomware attack

Point32Health, a leading health insurer and the parent company for Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Tufts Health Plan, has suffered a large technical outage due to a ransomware attack on Monday.

In a memo on its website, the company said the incident affected the systems used to service members, accounts, brokers, and providers. The insurer’s website was down for a while, and some members tried calling the insurer, saying they had experienced technical difficulties.

The outages mainly affected members covered under Harvard Pilgrim Health Care’s commercial and New Hampshire Medicare plans, though it did not impact those on the Tufts Health Plan.

The insurer said in a statement that after detecting the unauthorized activity, and out of caution, it proactively took certain systems offline to contain the threat. While Point32’s website appeared operational on Wednesday, Harvard Pilgrim’s website remained unavailable.

The company is still investigating whether the incident involved sensitive information from members. The company has notified law enforcement and regulators and is collaborating with third-party cybersecurity experts to investigate and resolve the incident thoroughly. The insurer stated that it was working around the clock to quickly restore impacted systems and urged members who needed assistance to call the member services number on their ID cards.