AI could provide key to healthcare cybersecurity

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Healthcare cybersecurity is a Gordian Knot problem—complex, difficult, and essential—but AI might provide the sword.

Andrea Abell, CISO at pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, is utilizing the technology available for all sorts of tasks. During a conversation with IT Brew at CES earlier this month, Abell said she uses AI “across the board.” Defenders should assume threat actors are doing the same.

“If we are looking to defend [against] generative AI, we have to think about all of the places that an attacker can take advantage of it,” Abell said.

Seeking out. Likening threat detection to finding a needle in a haystack, Abell said that she believes AI can make the haystack smaller and speed up the hunt, especially when combined with human knowledge. Agentic AI also has a role to play, especially in threat modeling.

“We’re doing what everyone else is doing, which is making agents to help reduce the human workload,” Abell said. “All of this new technology requires new defenses, new tooling, all of those types of things.”

In the healthcare sector, workers are often the last line of defense against hackers—and attacks can come when the focus is on saving lives, not protecting systems. John Riggi, national advisor for cybersecurity and risk at trade and lobbying group the American Hospital Association (AHA), told IT Brew in November that cybersecurity is an important part of any healthcare organization’s setup.

“Cyber hygiene is as important as medical hygiene to help protect patients from harm,” Riggi said.

Part of making that happen, said Alex Tyrrell, SVP and CTO of the health division at Wolters Kluwer, is ensuring there’s device security alongside the implementation of AI solutions.

“Training is going to be a key aspect and maintaining these guardrails, make sure the controls are in place,” Tyrell told IT Brew in December.

Get it right. Yes, there will be challenges. But Abell remains optimistic and hopeful about the future of AI-assisted cybersecurity in the healthcare space. Implementing change in the supply chain for vendor security, as well as modeling threats, requires a serious effort on the part of IT pros at Eli Lilly.

Abell added that she hopes initiatives like secure by default, which are being implemented by companies like Amazon and Microsoft, will help to offer a framework for small, rural healthcare centers and hospitals.

“I think we can produce tools, and I think we can do it easily now with AI that we couldn't before,” Abell said. “That’s what I’m most excited about.”