US healthcare technology company Astrana has told the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that attackers gained access to its servers and made off with private or confidential information. The company describes the incident as material to its financial position.
The filing, submitted on Tuesday evening, makes Astrana the latest in a string of healthcare tech firms to disclose a cyberattack to the US markets regulator in recent months.
Spoofed phone number opened the door
According to the report, the intrusion did not start with a software flaw. It started with a phone call. The attackers posed as Astrana staff and spoofed the company's main corporate telephone number, so calls to employees appeared to come from a trusted internal line.
Two US senators from opposite parties want the telecommunications industry to follow a common set of cybersecurity best practices. Adoption would be voluntary, and there would be an optional certification for companies that can show they follow them.
Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the Telecommunications Cybersecurity and Resilience Act on Thursday. They pointed to the Salt Typhoon campaign, in which Chinese hackers broke into nearly all of the major US telecom providers over several years.
“The Salt Typhoon intrusion was the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history and showed us just how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is, but it does not have to be that way,” Warner said. “If telecommunications companies adopt cybersecurity best practices, our networks can be more resilient.”
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has arrested two senior figures at Oxygen Forensics, a digital forensics and data extraction company whose software was bought by several federal agencies. Prosecutors allege the firm hid that Russian nationals controlled it and that its technology was developed in Russia.
Oxygen sells tools that investigators use to extract and analyze data from mobile devices, cloud services and drones. It competes directly with Cellebrite. Police and intelligence agencies commonly use this kind of software to break into phones. The company reportedly holds close to 10,000 contracts across more than 150 countries.
Its customers included the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Within DHS, several branches used Oxygen products:
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