Advancing Health IT, with the Expansion of Delivery Net Systems, Leaves More Room for Cyberattacks (Video Transcript)

Bill Russell (Interviewer): How do you feel about the work and the impact that it’s had and how are we doing in this cyber world? It’s constantly changing, so obviously work you did five years ago, you could get together today and start over because the world changes every day. David, we’ll start with you. Talk a little bit about the work and its impact, and then how do you think we’re doing?

David Ting (Tausight CTO and Founder): So I think the attack surface has gotten a lot larger. I think the number of people, the practices, the smaller organizations are being hammered. I mean, post COVID, my dental practice, he’s doing dental hygiene and he’s telling me about how he got attacked during COVID. And he said, “Do you know anything about ransomware?” He said, because my machines were all locked up when I came back. It was identified as an XP machine that he had on the network that was used for scanning X-rays. The legacy machines, unpatched, old versions, entry point. He said, I learned about Bitcoin, I learned how to restore my machine. He said, why would they attack a small practice with two doctors? I said, because they’re working from home.

Not only exposed more vulnerability, created more places where patient records are being accessed stored. It’s also creating more access points to backend hospital systems where they become also the entry points for attacks. More credentials are stolen. All these are the same byproducts of, we’ve expanded our delivery net systems. We’ve expanded places where we’re accessing. We’re trying to now with information sharing, start to leverage the power of having an IT backbone that can accelerate and improve healthcare. But we sure have increased our attack surface and the sophistication of the attacks are gotten way better because these organizations run like businesses.