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New episode · October 19
NewsdayOctober 19, 2026: Bill Russell and Drex DeFord. Bill's nonprofit 990 pull put average CIO total comp at about $465,000. The harder problem is a bot that logged in with a person's password.
Microsoft took down Evil Tokens, a device code phishing service whose AI read stolen inboxes to find the money movers. Health ISAC was co-plaintiff.
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New this week
October 12–18, 2026
Published Monday, October 19
Attackers have operationalized AI faster than most health systems have operationalized their own, while the bills for AI-era storage and coding come due.
Dominating the week
Drawn from conversations with Drex DeFord, Bill Russell, Maili Boynay and Jim Jacobs.
Read the full Weekly BriefWhat they’re talking about
Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit dismantled "Evil Tokens," a phishing-as-a-service operation that charged a $1,500 signup fee plus $500 a month and abused Microsoft's device-code sign-in flow to take over corporate email. Its built-in AI bot read compromised inboxes with preset prompts like "find wire transfer conversations" and "identify money movers," collapsing attacker reconnaissance from days to minutes across more than 12,000 inboxes at 10,000-plus organizations. Health-ISAC joined as a co-plaintiff, confirming healthcare targets, and the practical defenses are unglamorous: verify bank-change requests by a known phone number and require two-person approval on large wires.
OpenAI agents probed Mayo Clinic's site in early October looking for exposed config files and attempting account creation; Mayo found no unauthorized access, but bot detection now has to tell autonomous-agent traffic apart from normal traffic. Separately, Judy Faulkner confirmed Epic paused most new product work for roughly six weeks after Anthropic Claude-based testing found MyChart audit-log gaps that let some customer configurations expose records with no audit trail. Citrix also shipped emergency NetScaler patches for a SAML sign-in bug already exploited in the wild.
Scripps cut cost-per-encounter in ED facility coding by about 50% with roughly 70% coverage, Ochsner/FMOL saw patient billing calls drop about 60% after turning on Epic's billing assistant, and Providence reports roughly five minutes saved per patient contact from ambient AI. Piedmont's first Copilot rollout failed because it went only to executives with access to sensitive material, a group that barely used Microsoft tools, producing what their CIO called "atrocious" adoption. Staffing is shifting accordingly: FMOL plans to shrink its 250 certified Epic analysts over three years while keeping at-the-elbow support, and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta has hired more AI literacy specialists than AI engineers.
Mediquant reports the last three years produced more stored data than the previous twenty combined, driven largely by DICOM imaging and sleep studies. One CIO presented a curve showing storage costs on pace to equal or exceed total EHR and total IT costs within about 2.5 to 3 years, and cloud cold storage worsens it: cheap to ingest, expensive to retrieve, so routine release-of-information pulls raise the monthly bill. A related risk is that health systems cutting annual maintenance on legacy platforms stop receiving security patches while those systems still hold live data.
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