Podcast

2 Minute Drill

Hosted by Drex DeFord

Three hot cybersecurity stories in under two minutes. Drex DeFord delivers concise, actionable security intelligence for healthcare leaders twice a week.

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Episodes (195)

Jun 10, 2026·2 Minute Drill

Fox Tempest: The Dark Web Storefront That Sold Microsoft's Trust to Ransomware Gangs

That UAC prompt -- the little shield asking you to approve a publisher -- is one of the most foundational trust signals in Windows security. Your tools rely on it. Your team relies on it. Two people figured out how to sell it. What they built, and which ransomware gangs bought access, has a direct line to at least one recent health system breach. Drex breaks it down. Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid

Jun 9, 2026·2 Minute Drill

CISA's Own Credentials Were Sitting on GitHub for Six Months

CISA -- the federal agency whose job it is to protect America's critical infrastructure -- had its own internal credentials sitting in a public GitHub repository for six months. Plain text passwords. AWS GovCloud keys. SSH access tokens. Visible to anyone on the internet with a browser.What makes this worse: the contractor who created the repository didn't slip up accidentally. They actively disabled the default GitHub protections designed to prevent exactly this from happening. And when the rep

Jun 1, 2026·2 Minute Drill

NYC Health + Hospitals Breach: The Biometric Data You Can't Take Back - 2 Minute Drill

In late 2025, cyber attackers slipped into New York City Health + Hospitals through a third-party vendor and stayed undetected for nearly three months. When they left, they took more than records and Social Security numbers. They took fingerprints and palm prints -- biometric data belonging to some of the most vulnerable patients in the country. You can cancel a credit card. You can get a new password. You can even navigate a stolen SSN. You cannot get new fingerprints. What walked out of that n

May 21, 2026·2 Minute Drill

The Hidden First Step in Healthcare Ransomware Attacks Revealed | 2 Minute Drill with Drex DeFord

Ransomware attacks don't always start with a ransomware gang. They start with someone who gets paid to find the door. Aleksey Volkov, known online as ChewbaccaCore, was an initial access broker. His job was identifying vulnerable companies, exploiting their networks, establishing a foothold, and selling that access on dark web marketplaces. Over 16 months in 2021-2022, his work enabled attacks on seven confirmed US businesses, resulting in $9M in confirmed losses and $24M in intended ransom dema

May 15, 2026·2 Minute Drill

Scattered Spider's $27M Hacker Got Caught Reusing His Username | 2 Minute Drill With Drex DeFord

Tyler Buchanan grew up in Dundee, Scotland and became one of the most consequential cybercriminals in the English-speaking world. His method was almost insultingly simple: text messages. Posing as IT help desks, he sent phishing texts to employees at companies like Twilio, LastPass, Mailchimp, and DoorDash. Directing them to convincing fake login pages that captured credentials and 2FA codes in real time. Find out how he got caught in this 2 Minute Drill Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid

May 8, 2026·2 Minute Drill

How North Korea's Fake Company Compromised Millions | 2 Minute Drill with Drex DeFord

North Korean threat actors didn't breach a firewall. They built a fake company. UNC1069 spent two weeks constructing a convincing Slack workspace, fake team members, and LinkedIn profiles to earn the trust of Jason Seaman -- lead maintainer of Axios, a JavaScript library downloaded over 100 million times a week. One Teams call. One file. Within hours, malicious code was live and reaching health systems everywhere. The attack skipped the $50M security stack entirely and went straight to the human

Apr 30, 2026·2 Minute Drill

What Healthcare Can Learn From a 20 Year Old Hacker | 2 Minute Drill 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

Apr 24, 2026·2 Minute Drill

The Most Likely Way Into Your Network Is Still the Door You Forgot to Lock | 2 Minute Drill

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 alre

Apr 15, 2026·2 Minute Drill

2 Minute Drill: How a 22-Year-Old Took Down the World's Largest Botnet with Drex DeFord

The Kim Wolf botnet was the most powerful ever built — 2 million compromised IoT devices, a record-breaking 31.4 terabit DDoS attack, and it had the FBI, Google, and Cloudflare stumped. Drex breaks down how those cheap, forgotten devices in patient waiting rooms and break rooms became weapons inside hospital networks, and why 25% of Infoblox's enterprise healthcare clients were already compromised. Then comes the wild part: a 22-year-old RIT undergrad named Benjamin cracked the whole operation —

Apr 9, 2026·2 Minute Drill

2 Minute Drill: AI has now Hacked the Un-hackable with Drex DeFord

The window between vulnerability discovery and exploitation has collapsed — from 63 days in 2018 to negative. Now AI is changing the game entirely. Drex walks through how Anthropic's unreleased model Mythos autonomously found a critical zero-day in the Ghost CMS, wrote its own exploit, and extracted sensitive credentials in under two hours — all without a CVE ever existing. Add in two accidental Anthropic data leaks in the same week, and the story gets more complicated. For healthcare organizati

Mar 31, 2026·2 Minute Drill

2 Minute Drill: Who's Managing Your AI Agents? The Case for Non-Human HR with Drex DeFord

Drex makes the case for a role that doesn't exist yet but probably should: VP of Non-Human Resources. As AI agents multiply across health system environments, often deployed by vendors without oversight, the management infrastructure simply isn't keeping up. Agents have access, make judgment calls, and operate inside frameworks that affect patients and business operations, yet most have no job description, no onboarding, and no performance review. Drawing on signals from Harvard Business Review,

Mar 27, 2026·2 Minute Drill

2 Minute Drill: What Hackers Can Teach Healthcare About Resilience with Drex DeFord

Drex revisits the FBI and DOJ takedown of HANDALA, the Iranian-backed hacking group behind the Stryker wiper attack—and surfaces an uncomfortable lesson. Within 24 hours, the group was back online with new domains, same operations, same message. That's not a footnote. That's a case study in resilience. While healthcare organizations ask "how do we prevent this from happening," adversaries are asking "how fast can we rebuild when we lose everything?" The real challenge isn't just stopping attacks