FBI investigating cyberattack at Oracle, Bloomberg News reports

March 28 (Reuters) - The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is probing the cyberattack at Oracle that has led to the theft of patient data, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Earlier this month, Oracle alerted some healthcare customers that sometime after January 22, hackers accessed its servers and copied patient data to an outside location, the report said, adding that the hack was aimed at extorting multiple medical providers in the United States.

The FBI declined to comment. Oracle did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.

The report said it wasn't clear how many patient records were breached and which healthcare providers were targeted.

Austin, Texas-based Oracle acquired the U.S. healthcare IT company Cerner Corp for $28 billion in 2022, which bolstered the company's involvement in the electronic health record sector and likely increased the number of healthcare clients on its cloud platform.

The purchase came with a $16 billion contract with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which has seen highly publicized outages and lawmaker scrutiny, according to the report.

The company told customers the hackers accessed older Cerner servers, taking data that had not yet been shifted to Oracle's cloud storage service, the report said.

Oracle said it became aware of the breach around February 20, according to the report.

(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona and Edwina Gibbs)