Moody's says hack against UnitedHealth Group is 'credit negative' for the company

investing.com:

(Reuters) -Credit Rating agency Moody's (NYSE:MCO) said on Friday that the recently reported hack against UnitedHealth Group (NYSE:UNH) was «credit negative» for the company.

The agency cited potential «financial and reputational impacts» of the cybersecurity attack at UnitedHealth's technology unit Change Healthcare (NASDAQ:CHNG) on Wednesday that caused disruption to pharmacies across the United States.

UnitedHealth referred Reuters to the company's regulatory filing from Thursday when asked for a comment on Moody's report. In the filing, UnitedHealth had flagged that it has not yet determined whether the cybersecurity incident would impact its financial results.

Change Healthcare said on Friday that it had a «high-level of confidence that Optum, UnitedHealthcare and UnitedHealth Group systems have not been affected» by the attack.

The disruptions from the attack were expected to last at least through Friday, Change Healthcare said on its status page.

«We are working on multiple approaches to restore the impacted environment and will not take any shortcuts or take any additional risk as we bring our systems back online,» the healthcare billing and data systems provider added.

A variety of pharmacy chains have said they were experiencing disruptions following the outage at Change Healthcare.