Careers Information Security Podcast

A new AI-powered clinical decision support system developed by Google and NASA aims to help astronauts diagnose and treat medical issues during space missions - even when real-time communication with Earth is unavailable, said Chris Hein, field CTO of Google Public Sector.

New Texas health information legislation that began to go into effect on Sept. 1 includes several noteworthy provisions including requirements related to health record data storage and artificial intelligence, said regulatory attorney Rachel Rose. Rose explains the significance of the new state law.

Default credentials, weak passwords, misconfigurations and a variety of other security shortcomings are exposing millions of medical devices and their data on the internet, said Soufian El Yadmani, CEO and co-founder of Modat, who shared recent research findings.

Recent advisories from U.S. federal authorities on vulnerabilities in certain operational technology devices underscore the potential security risks that many healthcare providers frequently underestimate, said Sila Özeren, a security research engineer at Picus Security.

The use on online tracking tools on the health-related websites and apps of HIPAA and non-HIPAA regulated entities continues to be a lightning rod due to a long list of ongoing data privacy, regulatory and legal concerns, said partner and attorney Elizabeth Hodge of the law firm Akerman.

Why do AI agents require new identity governance approaches and the current controls not enough?

In this 15-minute podcast, identity experts examine key findings from recent industry research on machine identity governance and how you can secure them

Cybercrime gang Scattered Spider is the top suspect in several recent cyberattacks in the U.S. insurance sector, and it's likely that threat actors could still be lurking in other insurers' IT environments, said Peter McMurtrie of consulting firm West Monroe.

Rural hospitals and small medical practices must be creative and open-minded in when it comes locking down their digital footprint, said Jim Roeder, vice president of IT at Lakewood Health System. There's help from the private- and public-sectors and open source tools.

As healthcare providers and their vendors develop and implement agentic artificial intelligence and other AI tools, they need to throughly understand data privacy risks under HIPAA and other laws, said attorney Jordan Cohen of law firm Akerman LLP.

The flood of new artificial intelligence tools, including those to help cybersecurity teams, can overwhelm healthcare CISOs and their security staff, fueling "AI fatigue" that in itself can create additional cyber risk, said Drew Henderson and Jon Hilton, practice leaders at consulting firm LBMC.

Smaller and rural hospitals and clinics, as well as federally qualified health centers, are constantly battling cybersecurity resource constraints, and especially serious workforce shortages, said Jennifer Stoll of OCHIN, a nonprofit provider of health IT services and products.

While many of the proposed updates to the HIPAA Security Rule are reasonable expectations, others will be extremely onerous to implement if federal regulators finalize the rule's overhaul as it's written today, said Stephen Goudreault of Gigamon and Samantha Jacques of McLaren Health.

Identity security is still one of the most underinvested areas of cybersecurity across the healthcare sector, regardless of the depth of cyber resources available to many different types and sizes of entities, said Hugo Lai, CISO at Temple University Health System.

While healthcare organizations often know in general what they need to do in case they're faced with a ransomware attack, the devil is in the details of how comprehensive and well-rehearsed that incident preparedness plan is for optimal response, said Rick Doten, vice president and healthplan CISO at Centene Corp.

It's only a matter of time before cybercriminals begin to use artificial intelligence-enabled tools, open-source software and other technologies to launch attacks to exploit sensitive genetic data, said Nicholas Morris, a practice manager at security firm Optiv.

Emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies being applied in the health and wellness space that are not necessarily covered by HIPAA but instead fall under a variety of tough new state privacy laws that are being enacted, said attorney Lily Li of Metaverse Law.

Pharmaceutical companies typically have more mature cyber programs than other healthcare factions, but these firms also face unique risks involving their large attack surfaces, complex manufacturing, supply chains and sensitive intellectual property, said Joshua Mullen of Booz Allen Hamilton.

Although the National Institutes of Health appears to have scaled back plans to build a national registry to track individuals with autism, the agency's research project still poses critical data privacy concerns, said Ariana Aboulafia and Andrew Crawford of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Network segmentation is among new potential mandates for regulated entities under a proposed update to the HIPAA security rule, but many organizations continue to struggle to implement that as well as other critical best practices, said Candice Moschell of consulting firm Crowe LLP.