UnHack with Drex DeFord

Matthew Lane was 14 when he started probing the edges of online gaming systems. By 20, he had walked out of PowerSchool with data on nearly 70 million students and teachers using nothing but a contractor's stolen credentials he found on the dark web. Drex tells the full story and then lands the part that matters most for healthcare: Lane didn't exploit a sophisticated vulnerability. He used a username and password attached to someone who had legitimate access and simply walked through the front door. How many of your vendors have credentials that have never been audited? How many former contractors still have access? Is everyone using MFA on every system? The fundamentals are still the open book test, and too many organizations aren't passing it.
Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid
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April 28, 2026: When a hospital goes dark, the first 72 hours are everything. Laurie Campbell, Senior Manager of Clinical Ancillary Applications and Enterprise Imaging, and Rick McIntosh, VP and the Chief Technology Officer, at Children’s Hospital Colorado, break down the phased Code Dark response framework her team developed for ransomware attacks. They walk through real examples: how the supply chain keeps inventory moving without its systems, and how the radiology team built a sneakernet process to keep radiologists reading images even when the PACS environment is completely unreachable. This isn't theoretical. It's the result of years of workflow mapping, vendor co-development, and hard conversations across the entire organization.
Key Points:
03:12 Why Resilience Matters
07:18 Launching Code Dark
14:06 Workflow to Paper Playbooks
19:15 Twilight Tech Workarounds
27:03 Partners Lessons and Wrap

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April 27, 2026: Drex DeFord and Bill Russell are back on Newsday, and fresh off the 229 Summit, they're not pulling punches. Healthcare IT has a demand problem. Too many projects, not enough capacity, and an industry that's chronically bad at saying no. From the 229 Summit's sharpest takeaways to the Salesforce headless CRM announcement, the vl.js hack, and why Bill thinks Claude Code's "genesis key" is about to change everything, this episode covers the stories that matter most right now. If your project list is longer than your resources, this one is for you.
Key Points:
00:32 Summit takeaway priorities
06:41 Build vs buy with AI
10:49 Personal AI assistants speed
16:56 Headless CRM future UX
18:26 Security hacks fundamentals

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While the industry debates frontier AI models and nation-state threats, hospitals are still getting hit by ransomware through the same doors they've always left open. Drex zooms out to what's actually happening on the ground: massive patch cycles creating downstream operational pressure, countries reconsidering their software dependencies, and CISOs quietly doubling down on fundamentals. MFA, identity management, tested backups, network segmentation. The HICP documents are free, the roadmap already exists, and the data is clear. Most attacks don't start with advanced AI. They start with a stolen credential or a forgotten exposed system. The organizations most likely to survive what's coming are the ones executing the basics best right now.
Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid
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April 20, 2026: What happens when you layer AI onto broken processes without fixing them first? Angel Mena, MD, CMO of Symplr, joins Bill Russell, Drex DeFord, and Sarah Richardson on Newsday to answer that question with the kind of clinical candor only a practicing physician can bring. From ambient documentation to quality metrics to the credentialing chaos hiding inside every health system, this conversation exposes the gap between AI's promise and what healthcare leaders must do to close it before the opportunity slips away.
Key Points:
00:37 Clinicians and Tech Today
07:44 Beyond the AI Hype
14:49 Admin Burden Credentialing
18:44 Governance Change and Wrap
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