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

CALIFORNIA: Rating agency Moody's said on Friday that the recently reported hack against UnitedHealth Group 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 on Wednesday that caused disruption to pharmacies across the United States.

On the other hand, rating agency Fitch said the incident is not expected to impact UnitedHealth's ratings. The agency added that its rating outlook on the company is currently "stable".

Despite moderate business disruption and financial resources required to deal with the immediate threat, Fitch said it does not expect that UnitedHealth's capital position or financial performance will be materially affected.

UnitedHealth referred Reuters to the company's regulatory filing from Thursday when asked for comment on the 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.