Cyber Survivor

A hospital can sound normal on the outside while everything critical is failing behind the scenes. When cyberattacks hit healthcare, the damage is measured in more than stolen data, it shows up as canceled visits, delayed procedures, and care teams forced to improvise while systems are taken offline. That’s the world behind Cyber Survivor, where healthcare cybersecurity becomes a patient safety st...

A hospital can survive bad press. It might even survive a tough quarter. What it can’t survive is a cyber event that shuts down care. That’s why we sit down with Dr. Dennis Leber, a longtime healthcare cybersecurity leader with a background in law enforcement and military service, to talk about what “cybersecurity is patient safety” really means when systems fail and clinicians still have to treat...

A cyber event doesn’t feel “digital” when you’re the one on the gurney. We’re joined by Jack, who shares his story anonymously after being impacted as a patient during a hospital cyber incident while being treated for prostate cancer. He takes us from pre-surgery nerves to the uncomfortable reality of not fully knowing what’s happening once you’re under anesthesia and relying on a care team, techn...

A handwritten note on a doctor’s office door doesn’t sound like the start of a cybersecurity story until you realize the clinic can’t even tell you why they’re closed. I’m Dan Dotson, and I sit down with our second John Doe, who’s spent nearly two decades in healthcare cybersecurity, to unpack what it feels like when the crisis you usually defend against suddenly hits you as a patient. John walks...

The scariest words in a hospital shouldn’t be “systems are down,” but that’s exactly what John hears while he’s lying in a bed with crushing pain, fever, and doctors worried an infection could be moving toward sepsis. He came in expecting fast answers and coordinated care. Instead, he watches a modern emergency workflow buckle under a ransomware incident, and he feels the emotional whiplash that c...

A hospital can survive a lot, but it cannot treat patients when core clinical systems go dark. We sit down with Dr. Mark Yoffe, a physician who also thinks like a cybersecurity leader, to unpack what healthcare cyber risk really looks like from the bedside. As electronic health records replaced paper charts, care got faster and more coordinated, but the blast radius of outages, ransomware, and cre...

The scariest part of a healthcare cyberattack isn’t the headline. It’s the quiet moment a clinician realizes they can’t register a patient, scan a medication, verify a dose, or send a lab order and the waiting room is still filling up. We sit down with an anonymous frontline nurse we call Jane Doe and walk through what “normal” looks like in a busy pediatric clinic: constant triage, newborn and we...

In this episode of Cyber Survivor, host Dan Dotson speaks with Dr. Richard Hartnett, co-director of the Ohio Cyber Range Institute, about shifting cybersecurity from a compliance checkbox to a proactive, organization-wide business practice. They discuss the theory of persistent engagement, tailored training for different hospital roles, the growing threat from financially motivated ransomware grou...

What happens when a hospital’s voice system fails during a cyber event? Not just dropped calls—entire care workflows unravel. In this conversation with Eric Enos, CTO at LifePoint, we pull back the curtain on how modern care really runs and why resilience, not raw uptime, is the metric that matters. From EHR dependence to nurse call routing and location awareness, the hidden mesh of systems that p...

Imagine the LED lights are on, clinicians are ready, and every screen goes dark. That’s the moment when governance—not gadgets—keeps care moving. We sit down with healthcare IT leader and board veteran Richard Helppie to chart a practical path for hospital boards to own cybersecurity as a top strategic risk, not a backend tech chore. We start by separating governance from operations and translatin...

Cyber Survivor host Dan Dodson interviews Axel Wirth, chief security strategist at MedCrypt, about the rising cyber risks facing medical devices and what that means for patient care. Wirth explains that he began as a hardware electrical engineer in the medical device and health IT world before moving into cybersecurity in 2008, eventually focusing exclusively on medical device security and helping...

A cyberattack on a vendor shouldn’t be the moment a hospital learns how interconnected its world really is. We sit down with Greg Surla, Chief Information Security Officer at FinThrive, to unpack how third‑party risk, revenue cycle platforms, and frontline care are woven together—and why resilience depends on planning with partners before the crisis hits. From joint tabletop exercises that include...

A hospital room can hold 10 to 20 networked devices, each vital to care—and each a potential doorway for attackers. We sit down with Phil Englert, VP of Medical Device Security at Health ISAC, to explore how connected care improves outcomes while reshaping risk, and why building resilience and rapid recovery plans is now as critical as prevention. Phil traces the evolution from clinician-driven da...

The conversation explores how healthcare’s rapid digitization has improved patient outcomes while dramatically increasing cyber risk, making hospitals lucrative, constantly targeted entities. Dr. C.S. Kruse traces his path from Army Medical Service Corps IT specialist to academic leader and prolific researcher in health IT and cybersecurity, emphasizing both technology’s clinical benefits and its...

Alarms don’t always sound when hospitals are under attack. Sometimes the first signal is a locked EHR, diverted ambulances, and a clinical team scrambling to deliver care without the tools they trained on. We sit down with Butzel attorney Claudia Rast—leader of cybersecurity and AI practices and former co-chair of the ABA’s presidential cybersecurity task force—to unpack how threat actors use agen...

The alarms aren’t just in the data center anymore. When ransomware shutters clinics and pushes oncology schedules into chaos, the question isn’t “What did they exfiltrate?” It’s “Who didn’t get care?” We sit down with Jen Ellis, founder of NextGen Security and co-chair of the Ransomware Task Force, to unpack how cybersecurity in healthcare became a patient safety issue—and what it will take to kee...

Cyber threats don’t just steal data—they halt care, cancel clinics, and shake trust. I sat down with Brent Yax, founder and CEO of Aweccom Technologies to unpack the hard truth: today’s attackers are profit-driven, organized, and focused on disrupting operations until we pay. We trace how the threat landscape shifted from amateur mischief to a mature cyber economy, why small and mid-market healthc...

Dan Dodson hosts Drex DeFord, a leader in healthcare cybersecurity, to discuss the evolution and current state of cybersecurity in healthcare. Drex shares his career journey from a hospital administrator in the Air Force to leading roles in various healthcare organizations and consulting for tech companies. He describes how the rapid digitization of healthcare, particularly through electronic heal...

Dan Dodson interviews Dr. Bradley Fowler, author of “Cybersecurity Leadership for Healthcare Organizations and Institutions of Higher Education,” discussing the pressing cybersecurity workforce shortages and the role of education and leadership in addressing risks. Dr. Fowler shares insights from his research, emphasizing human error as a major cause of breaches and the critical need for robust po...

This episode distills memorable insights from six months of interviews with healthcare cybersecurity leaders and clinicians. The five lessons: focus on fundamentals over flashy tech (Phil Alexander), ensure leadership at all levels (Chrissi Maguire), rely on preparation and people during outages (Katrina Brown), recognize every cyber event as a patient safety issue (Dr. Jeffery Tully), and cultiva...

What happens when artificial intelligence starts making healthcare decisions faster than humans can review them? Dr. Ali Dehghantanha’s Professor and Canadian Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence, takes us on a fascinating journey through the evolving landscape of healthcare cybersecurity where self-healing AI systems may soon become our frontline defenders. The cybersecurity ba...

Dan Dodson and cybersecurity expert T.J. Ramsey discussed the escalation of ransomware attacks in healthcare, emphasizing that ransomware is a form of extortion malware used primarily for financial gain, with attackers operating like organized crime syndicates. Ramsey traced his journey from military intelligence to cybersecurity, explained the operational and financial pressures making healthcare...

Dr. Jeff Tulley, a board-certified physician and co-director of the UCSD Center for Healthcare Cybersecurity, discusses the intersection of healthcare and cybersecurity. He highlights the benefits of digitization in healthcare, such as clinical decision support and interoperability, but also acknowledges the increased attack surface. Tulley's research focuses on the impact of technology failu...

Join us in this compelling episode of the Cyber Security Podcast as we sit down with Scott Augenbaum, a former FBI agent with a distinguished career in cybersecurity spanning back to 1988. Augenbaum takes us on a fascinating journey through the evolution of cybercrime, from its early days of thrill-seeking individuals to today's highly organized and sophisticated transnational threats. He rev...

In this episode,  Chief Nursing Officer Katrina Brown recounts her experience managing a cyberattack at USA Health Providence Hospital. The attack severely impacted the hospital's Electronic Medical Records (EMR) and other critical systems, leading to a significant decrease in efficiency and a necessary reduction in patient census. Brown highlights the crucial role of strong leadership and we...