At the end of April, the health insurance IT service provider Bitmarck was the victim of a cyber attack, and since then there have been disruptions at numerous health insurance companies. So far, no end to the countermeasures is in sight, as Bitmarck writes. The services should start again step by step and not with all health insurance companies at the same time. A large part of the affected health insurance companies can only be reached via specially set up or private e-mail addresses. There are also significant problems with internal processes, such as analysis tools in controlling.
Health insurance companies warn of phishing attacks
According to previous analyses, the data could neither be stolen nor encrypted by internationally active cybercriminals who, according to Bitmarck, act “professionally and with a high level of criminal energy”. According to the health insurance companies and Bitmarck, customer data is not affected. Many health insurance companies include a note on protection against phishing attempts in the error reports.
Payments go out again
Since the end of last week, some health insurance companies have been making payments for care allowances and the like again. According to many health insurance companies, access to digitally stored documents is still restricted, which will probably result in service restrictions. There could also be delays because service apps and online forms are currently not available.
Emergency operation set up
With some of the health insurance companies, there is currently only an announcement with an indication of technical faults, others are not available to customers – there is no emergency operation there. Some health insurance companies have stated that they have been able to work to a limited extent since last Friday and can be reached by insured persons via telephone, chat, website, post and fax as well as personally in the offices.
Other health insurance companies, also from the ranks of company health insurance companies, are less affected. In their case, it is not the administration of insured persons and telephony that are affected by the shutdown of the systems, but only the electronic sick leave (eAU) and the electronic patient file (ePA), as also emerges from an updated report by Gematik, which is responsible for the digitization of the healthcare system. According to Bitmarck and other responsible persons, the processing of the eAU is working again, but there are still errors in almost half of the electronic patient files from the “Bitmarck network” – 44,000 out of 94,000. Some health insurance companies still have problems with identity and access management at the ePA.
Bitmarck writes that important “internal health insurance services such as the transmission of statistical data and clearing data, the TRAVIC-Link communication system for the transmission of data from service providers, registration data or social security data, the KIM specialist service and central processing processes” are available again. This means that the core business processes such as payment transactions are working again for some health insurance companies. At the end of April there were still restrictions on sending documents such as the eAU and the electronic doctor’s letter, which is sent via the communication service in medicine (KIM).
Health insurance companies such as DAK were always available and were only unable to process sick leave for a few days. However, Bitmarck was able to avert greater damage with the measures. While some health insurance companies are hardly affected by the measures, according to Bitmarck, health insurance companies in the southern region are particularly affected by restrictions in day-to-day business.
Bitmarck works up
The IT service provider Bitmarck has been the victim of a cyber attack since April 21. The IT service provider is working together with the LKA and security experts such as the BSI and IT forensic experts to process the incident. Due to the security measures, various systems were taken offline, for example a Munich data center.
(mack)
