Cyber Summit preview: Zscaler’s Jim Bowie on healthcare’s embedded AI blind spot

Healthcare has absorbed a string of costly cyberattacks in the past two years. Change Healthcare’s breach compromised roughly 100 million patient records. Ascension’s systems were down for six weeks across more than 130 hospitals. Yale New Haven agreed to an 18 million dollar payout after patients sued over a data breach. And at Brockton Hospital, a systems outage meant cancer patients couldn’t get scheduled chemotherapy treatments.

These incidents predate the current wave of AI adoption, but they illustrate what’s at stake as healthcare’s attack surface keeps expanding. AI is now part of that expansion, and not always in ways security teams can see. At the CHIME DHX State of Cybersecurity: Tactical Defense Virtual Summit on Oct. 6, Zscaler’s Jim Bowie will address a risk category many healthcare security leaders haven’t fully mapped: embedded AI.

Most conversations about AI in healthcare security focus on shadow AI, meaning employees using unauthorized tools like ChatGPT without IT’s knowledge. Embedded AI is different. It’s AI functionality that vendors build directly into hardware and software already running on the network, often without triggering a security review, because from the organization’s perspective nothing new was installed.

Bowie will lead the session “Shadow AI: Transforming Risk Into Responsible Healthcare,” covering both categories and what can happen when embedded AI shows up in clinical settings without the security team’s knowledge. He will also share tactics and policies drawn from his own experience in hospital and health system security, along with recommendations attendees can apply at their own organizations.

Speakers at the summit include Health-ISAC CEO Denise Anderson and CrowdStrike’s Todd Felker, who will cover the most active AI threats facing healthcare today to help attendees prioritize where to focus remediation efforts.

The CHIME DHX Cybersecurity Virtual Summit will kick off at 1PM ET on October 6 with insights from some of healthcare’s leading thought leaders. Register today to join the conversation or access the content on demand after the event here.