UnitedHealthcare's Optum Left an AI Chatbot, Used By Employees To Ask Questions About Claims, Exposed To the Internet

Healthcare giant Optum has restricted access to an internal AI chatbot used by employees after a security researcher found it was publicly accessible online, and anyone could access it using only a web browser. TechCrunch: The chatbot, which TechCrunch has seen, allowed employees to ask the company questions about how to handle patient health insurance claims and disputes for members in line with the company's standard operating procedures (SOPs).

While the chatbot did not appear to contain or produce sensitive personal or protected health information, its inadvertent exposure comes at a time when its parent company, health insurance conglomerate UnitedHealthcare, faces scrutiny for its use of artificial intelligence tools and algorithms to allegedly override doctors' medical decisions and deny patient claims.

Mossab Hussein, chief security officer and co-founder of cybersecurity firm spiderSilk, alerted TechCrunch to the publicly exposed internal Optum chatbot, dubbed 'SOP Chatbot.' Although the tool was hosted on an internal Optum domain and could not be accessed from its web address, its IP address was public and accessible from the internet and did not require users to enter a password.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.