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In years past, medical facilities weren’t as vulnerable as they are now; hackers had an unwritten rule not to target institutions or services where a disruption could put people in physical danger.
But that’s no longer the case: Ransomware-as-a-service has proliferated and stolen medical information has become highly monetizable, spurring threat actors to attack hospitals at unprecedented levels.
Alberta Health Services (AHS) doesn’t intend to leave itself vulnerable — the medical system is bolstering its defenses with AI.
Deploying AI-reinforced cyber ops from cybersecurity platform Securonix, AHS has cut its average time to respond to high-priority incidents by more than 30%. It has also reduced false positive alerts by 90% and workloads by 2 to 3 hours per day, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings.
“Many hospital networks are big fat, easy targets,” Richard Henderson, AHS executive director and CISO, told VentureBeat. “I don’t sleep very much because I’m just terrified of getting that phone call at 2 a.m. saying the entirety of our environment has gone down due to ransomware.”
Doing the work of 1,000 (or substantially more) SOC analysts
AHS is the second-largest hospital network in North America and the world’s largest single instance of the electronic healthcare records (EHR) platform Epic.
Henderson explained that he and his team are responsible for cybersecurity for 106 hospitals, 800 clinics, 20,000 doctors and 150,000 staff serving 4.5 to 5 million Albertans. He described AHS as a “massive on-prem organization,” with every facility connected to the same Epic install.
So, Henderson noted, “if it goes down, it goes down for everybody. And, it’s not hyperbole for me to say that if it goes down, it could very well have an impact on a patient’s life.”
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