We’re all about celebrating the small victories at IT Brew, and this week we asked healthcare CISOs about something near and dear to their heart: their biggest wins of 2024.

This year was one to remember for the healthcare industry, and not for good reasons. Less than two months into the year, Change Healthcare, one of the largest health payment processing companies in the world, experienced a ransomware attack that compromised the information of around 100 million Americans. Meanwhile, the infamous CrowdStrike outage in July disrupted the services of hospitals and health systems across the country.

Still, many CISOs were able to roll with the punches and maneuver their organization through the year’s major events smoothly, while juggling day-to-day operations. IT Brew caught up with four CISOs across the healthcare industry to learn what they considered their greatest accomplishment of the year.

​​The remarks below have been edited for length and clarity.

For Mike Levin, CISO at Solera Health, an Arizona-based healthtech startup, it was reframing how his company views security: Security in a lot of organizations…is treated as a compliance requirement. It’s a thing that you have to do to get past the auditors, or “win the audit”…Here at Solera, we’re focusing upon treating security as something that is an increased value to all of our customers, members, and the payers that we work with.

Read the rest here.—BM

As IT pros begin to close the ticket on 2024, we at IT Brew are once again asking tech practitioners not to predict trends for 2025, but to look backward and answer way weirder questions like, Have you ever seen a laptop on fire?

For the second year in a row, we asked our industry friends: What’s the wildest help desk ticket you’ve ever dealt with?

While last year’s responses gave us unpredictable troubleshooting scenarios involving dead lizards and oozing shampoo, this year’s responses didn’t disappoint, and involved celebrity impersonation, WWE-style remediation, and, of course, a laptop on fire.

These responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Nicola De Gregorio, IT technician, Workleap: They dropped, if I recall correctly, a coffee on their computer…So, I decided to open the back lid and just make sure to wipe everything off, or at least blow some air on it to make sure that it would dry. And as soon as I turned the computer around, I opened the back lid, and then I saw small flames coming out of the main board. I just unplugged the battery right away, and I was like, “Well, this computer won’t be used anymore.”

Tom Sepper, chief customer officer, Kinsta: There was suspected abuse on an account of ours, and we had requested an identity verification…The photo was a photo of [actor] Terry O’Quinn and the bar code name at the very bottom of the passport page was Jeremy Bentham. I don’t know if you’ve watched Lost, but Jeremy Bentham was an alias of Terry O’Quinn’s character in Lost.

Read more here.—BH