Cyber Survivor

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...

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.

Joh...

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 comes ...

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 credential theft grew right along with...

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 well v...

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 groups, and how AI and algorithmic agent...

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 power bedside care can b...

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 translating cyber into the ...

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 manufacturers both improve their p...

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 critical vendors to pr...

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 data sharing to an era where ma...

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 “dark side.&rdquo...

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 a...

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 ...

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 healthcare...

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 health record (EHR) adopt...

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 policy compliance and upd...

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 cultivate strong governance and organizati...

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 battlefield shifts constantly. ...