Brian Kruger 0:00
Welcome to Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge, the fiercely nonpartisan discussion that seeks policy solutions to issues of the day. Rich is a successful entrepreneur in the technology, health and finance space. He and his wife Leslie are also philanthropists with interest in civic and artistic endeavors with a primary focus on medically and educationally underserved children.
Richard Helppie 0:23
Welcome to the Common Bridge. We have a great topic with a great expert today, Dan Dodson, the Chief Executive Officer of Fortified Health Security. I’d also like to start this podcast off by thanking the many listeners to the podcast now over three quarters of a million downloads–750,000 and rising fast. Thank you very much. For those of you that have yet to subscribe, please do so on Apple, Amazon, Buzzsprout, iHeart Radio, Spotify, or most other places you get your podcast, or of course on YouTube TV and register for free at RichardHelppie.com because we’ve got some really good things coming. So let me introduce our guest today and his entire bio will be up on our website RichardHelppie.com. Dan L. Dodson is the Chief Executive Officer of Fortified Health Security. Fortified is a recognized leader in cybersecurity; focusing on protecting patient data and reducing risk in the healthcare industry. You’ve got to remember the healthcare industry is the largest part of our economy and it’s important to all of us– there’s a lot of interaction with data. He’s backed by a great team of cybersecurity consultants, and has produced an industry-leading report called the Horizon Report. This examines the state of cybersecurity in healthcare. It’s very comprehensive, semi annually, it’s free for all industry stakeholders. I think it just shows Dan’s commitment to the industry. Dan Dodson is a featured media source on many topics including security best practices, data privacy strategies, risk management and mitigation. He also welcomes any opportunity to discuss the latest findings in the Horizon Report, along with the ever growing security challenges being faced in a post COVID-19 world. Dan’s everywhere, he’s been in Security Magazine, Associated Press, Medical Economics, Health IT Security, Med City News and Cybersecurity Drive. He is not a newbie at this. He’s been leading business units for healthcare consultants Santa Rosa Consulting as Executive Vice President, he’s been the Global Healthcare Strategy lead for Dell Services, where he was responsible for the strategy, the business planning and merger and acquisition initiatives for that healthcare business unit. He’s led strategic efforts for other health care and health insurance organizations, including the Covenant Health System and the Partner Group. Dan was featured by Becker’s Hospital Review, again a leading authority in healthcare, as a rising healthcare leader under 40 and just in 2018, and he has served on the Southern Methodist University Cybersecurity Advisory Board. So we’re very fortunate that Dan’s agreed to spend a few minutes with us today to talk about cybersecurity. Dan, welcome, and I hope that everybody will pay attention as you introduce the topic and we’re going to try to go from A to Z in 40 minutes or so.
Dan Dodson 3:20
Rich, thank you so much for that introduction, and super happy to be here and look forward to the conversation this morning.
Richard Helppie 3:25
So today we’re going to talk about cyber attacks and countermeasures. Cybersecurity –what is it? How does it work? What makes people want to engage in cybercrime? Where does it come from, how to prevent it and how to guard against becoming a victim? Dan, our audience likes to know a little bit about our guests. So can you tell us where to spent your early days?
Dan Dodson 3:45
Yeah, thanks Rich, for sure. So, I’ve always been intrigued with healthcare from a little boy. My neighbor started and exited a medical billing organization. So I saw him build this business on the administrative side of healthcare. He was a mentor for me then and still is today. And so that led me on a journey to pursue the support of healthcare and I ended up in Healthcare IT. Started at Texas Tech University, I have an MBA in Health Organization Management, and really been in Healthcare IT since it had the boon in the backs of ARRA. So there was all this money coming into health care to digitize it. I helped drive initiatives in the early days that processed thing which led to Dell services, as you kind of outlined in the intro, and then really focused a lot on the EHR working with Santa Rosa and some other organizations.
Richard Helppie 4:31
EHR is the electronic health record.
Dan Dodson 4:32
Yes, sir, the electronic health record. And what I found was on the backs of this boon in digitization, there wasn’t this focus on security, right. And it was an infrastructure issue. So the networks that these electronic health records were sitting on sometimes were legacy and cobbled together through the consolidation of health systems, which has been a trend in healthcare and so there were pockets of vulnerabilities. But now we had all this rich data. And so I got intrigued with the cyber security elements and have been focused in that for the last five plus years. And we at Fortified Health Security have built a really nice business helping predominantly health systems to take care of patient information. And you know, the good guys on the opposite end of cyber attacks.
Richard Helppie 5:18
So when the bad guys are trying to get in, you’ve got layers of technology and human beings that try to keep them out.
Dan Dodson 5:24
Yeah, that’s right, Rich. I mean, I think that the dynamics in cybersecurity is really people, process, and technology. And so what a lot of people hear about are the advances of technology. And that’s great. But in order to actually let that technology reduce risk and protect patients, you have to have experts and process around that technology to actually drive the value. And so that’s really what we focus on is making sure that layered technology stack, so to speak, is functioning correctly to actually throw it off these bad actors.
Richard Helppie 6:00
And you know, look, Republicans heard a lot about cyber attacks. And you know, we’re told to protect our passwords, we’re told to use encryption, guard our phones, keep a close eye on our bank records, use dual authentication, (that means you get a text after you sign on and say is this really you?) And yet, we’re still told, perhaps our information is out in some place called the dark web, we’ve seen the shutdown of the colonial pipeline due to a ransomware attack, and I hope we get into that a little bit today, And, and you know, look, we’re in an interconnected world, a photo that someone takes right now can literally be around the world in the blink of an eye. And that includes our personal financial information that can be whisked away as well. And the world’s getting more interconnected. There’s more devices on the web, it’s the Internet of things. And now we hear about artificial intelligence programs that are just searching out our vulnerabilities all the time. That’s pretty frightening, frankly. So let’s dive into cybercrime cyber security, what the future holds, and I know we’re gonna get some education and maybe some policy ideas and maybe some personal things that each of us can do. So now, is there a simple definition for cybercrime or cyber attack this, like, when we throw those words out? What do we mean?
Dan Dodson 7:14
Yeah, I would say simply put Rich, it’s a coordinated effort to damage or destroy electronic information. Right. And once you do that, you can exploit it in multiple different ways. And we could talk about those ways that you can exploit it, but you know, very simply, it’s trying to, you know, damage or destroy sensitive information.
Richard Helppie 7:35
And so cybersecurity is kind of the countermeasure to that, or is there a better definition than that?
Dan Dodson 7:40
Yeah, it precisley, Rich. I mean, think of it as the good guys. Right? So the cyber security initiatives, programs, capital deployment within businesses, the personal things we can do, those are countermeasures, if you will, to protect that information. And we’ve tried to do that through a layered approach. But that that’s right.
Richard Helppie 7:57
What are some of the types of cyber attacks and bearing in mind that our audience is not healthcare or technology, or certainly not cybersecurity experts, but you know, we’ve heard about ransomware, denial of service, phishing… Is there a kind of a compendium of the types of cyber attacks that we’re experiencing?
Dan Dodson 8:17
Yeah, I think the most common cyber attacks are going to be what’s labeled as ransomware. Technically, what that is, simply put, Rich is a bad actor’s gotten into your environment and is holding your data for ransom. And if you pay the ransom, they’ll unlock the data. Conceptually, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But the actual exploit is what’s called malware, right, which is a virus in the old days. And so it’s actually the malware that enables the ransomware. And so when we think about the psyche of these bad actors, majority of the time, they’re out for monetary gain, they want your money. And so they figured out that ransom is a great way to get money versus just simply selling it on the dark web, let me actually hold the business or the person hostage, so that you know, they’re more likely to pay.
Richard Helppie 9:05
So if I understand, so there is a piece of malware, they penetrate the network, they put it on someone’s network, and then the business all of a sudden, their computers don’t work. And they’re told they gotta pay ransom, usually in some kind of digital currency, then it’ll give you the key to turn it back on. Otherwise, we’re going to just destroy it,
Dan Dodson 9:24
Right. And so you as a business are back into a position of either restoring from backups that you have, simply put other copies of your infrastructure and your applications that you might have as part of your you know your IT strategy or pay the ransom to get the key. Now what what’s often not talked about as much is, once you receive the key, you still have to cleanse all of your machines, you have to make sure that they’re not in your environment anymore. It’s extraordinarily costly. And what’s really interesting from a timing perspective, Rich, kind of talks about the psyche of these criminals, is look at what happened in Ireland. The National Health System gets locked out, the bad guys hold it, ransom. And then they say, wait a minute, we didn’t really want to disrupt care, but we are. So we’re going to give you the key for free so that you can begin the repair process. And so the layman might think, Oh, I put the key and boom, I’m back up. And I use my electronic health record. It’s not that simple. But I am still holding your data. So I’m going to let you go back to business and protect communities because I’m not that bad. But if you want your data not to be exposed, you still got to pay. (Rich -Oh, boy) that’s a great way to think about the psyche of these bad actors. And that’s the driving force, is the monetary gain.
Richard Helppie 10:39
So they’ve got like, two ways to illicitly prosper. One is that the target victim here pays a ransom. And the second way is they’ve got my social security number, they’ve got my credit card number, they’ve got all my insurance information. They, you know, they may have sensitive data that, you know, people wouldn’t want out, you know, about their, you know, medical care, particularly mental health cases and that type of thing. And that’s maybe why I know, I’ve gotten notices before people say, Hey, you, you’ve got an account with us, and we’ve been breached. So we’re gonna buy you a security service. So they’ve got multiple ways to make money off this.
Dan Dodson 11:17
Yeah, absolutely Rich, and you hear sometimes in the, I mean, it’s been covered by lots of national news lately around the cost of a health care breach to the organization that is ransomed or that is attacked or exploited. But in the personal side, you know, if your banking information gets compromised, as you just talked about it, you change your password, you change your account. Well, healthcare in the US is primarily driven by your social security number. And so part of the reason it’s valuable is because they can monetize it, and it’s not easily changed, you can’t change it. That’s number one. Number two is rich, the data set, it becomes more valuable every day, as individuals in that data set become eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, I can fraudulantly bill. So there’s like there’s just like so many avenues for them to exploit the medical information and then sell it, obviously.
Richard Helppie 12:10
They’ve got your cell phone number, (Dan, cell phone, social.) So you know, again, is the objective of these cyber criminals different if the target’s a nation. I know there’s been talk of national security issues. If it’s a, you know, JPMorgan Chase or a big business, or if the target an individual, I mean, I understand healthcare with all that rich data. But how risky is it right now for our nation, that bad actors, foreign actors or crime networks can actually maybe disrupt our ability to respond to a military threat,
Dan Dodson 12:40
You know, Rich, I think that in the second half of ’20, and I’ve talked a lot about this, there was a there’s a call to arms as I think about it in healthcare, primarily because we’re seeing massive disruption to care in our community. So ultimately, you know, when we think about cybersecurity, we typically think about like confidentiality, integrity, and availability and CIA. In healthcare, it’s all about availability, we have to be able to serve the patients in our community. And what we started to see was these massive disruptions on the ability to deliver care. When I talked to hospitals, and they go down, their system goes down, they’ve been digitized for 15 years, they don’t know how to work on paper. They don’t know how to operate like that we’ve been digitized now. And so I can’t deliver care, I have to divert care. Those are big disruptions. And so I think there’s a huge human element to it that’s unique to healthcare that you may not see in financial services certainly don’t want to lose money, obviously. And you know, healthcare, the stakes are high. And then you mentioned on the intro, you know, colonial pipeline. I mean, this is this is an infrastructure issue. And the question is, how do we put policies in place to help fight it.
Richard Helppie 13:45
Exactly, and any way to quantify this? Like how big of an issue is cybercrime and cyber attacks? Does anybody say, hey, there’s 10 a day or, you know, 100 a day or a million a day, is there any way to put a number on it?
Unknown Speaker 13:58
So there’s a couple of different statistics I’d share, Rich. So one is that there was a study done by Check Point, I believe, which is a healthcare — excuse me, which is a cybersecurity company that said, one in 39 health systems have had some type of ransomware activity in their environment. You know, we think that number may actually be greater, candidly. When you think about reportable, successful attacks, or breaches as they’re called, in healthcare, that’s a reportable event. So to the government. So if you have more than 500 Records exposed, you must report it. In the first five months of this year, 255 organizations have been compromised, greater than 500.
Richard Helppie 14:37
Wow and I know that healthcare was not the first target. The first target really was our national security. And then it was, you know, banks and financial institutions. So these bad actors are really honing their trade elsewhere before they come, you know, right at all of us in healthcare and what’s being done in the area of cybersecurity. We think about that, like what is the Federal government doing to protect our missile systems and our social security systems and what our business is doing. And I know that the bad actors are using artificial intelligence where the computers are learning about the computers. What about the countermeasures? And is there any chance that you know, maybe our national security services, protect businesses and ultimately, healthcare and ultimately, consumers? What’s going on on the protection side?
Dan Dodson 15:27
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, Rich. And I think that, you know, at the the second half of ’20, in the Trump administration and into the Biden administration, you know, they are starting to take cyber security a lot more serious. I’m not by no stretch, a policy expert. You know, there was some executive orders that Trump pushed through at the end, there’s some that Biden’s pushed through, there’s this notion that the government’s going to go to zero trust model, which is a long, complicated technical journey to make sure that the sources that are talking or known, I’ll leave it there, simply put, but that’s a long, multi-year journey, that’s expensive. I think the government has been focused certainly on the infrastructure that they have for the FBI, the CIA, the counterterrorism things that they do, etc. They were the creators of the ability to navigate in the dark web, you know, folks think about the dark web. So you know, there’s kind of like, simply put kind of three layers to the internet, if you will know, you, you all see kind of the surface layer, which is you go to Google and you go to a different source, and it pops up, that’s fine. And then there’s kind of like, the deep web, which is, hey, I’ve got to log in. This is like, what your banking information is protected, it’s encrypted, and you have the dark web. And the dark web was designed in the 70’s for individuals and agencies and the government to navigate without being tracked. Again, simply put, and so bad actors have used the ability of the dark web to navigate without being traced. And so there’s good to that. And then there’s bad to that. And so what we hear about is the bad but there is some good. And so I think the government’s done and has some success stories, Rich, and and working on countermeasures in the dark web to stop some of this exploitation. But there’s certainly a ways to go. You know, I think in healthcare, what is complicated for us is we work with hundreds of health systems of all sizes, community hospitals, large IDN’s, and everybody’s at a different point in their cybersecurity journey. So everybody needs something different, Rich. And so how do you write a policy or deploy capital at a federal level, when literally, everybody needs something different; they’re all at a different at a different place. And I’m sure that transcends other industries as well. And so that becomes the regulatory, you know, challenge when it thinks about actually executing and deploying capital to create the countermeasures that we need.
Richard Helppie 17:36
Well, I like the sounds of no trust environment. And I like the fact that our federal government is leading that because if we can get those protocols and national standards right, then maybe we have a chance, and I’m sure there’ll be a counter strike to that countermeasure. And I wouldn’t imagine there’s any way to know who’s winning these days. But I know, look, I’ve been in your security operations center, and you had some technology that was actually showing threats, like where they were originating from, and it just lit up the screen. They were coming from Eastern Europe and from South America and everyplace else.
Dan Dodson 18:11
Yeah, yeah, you’re right. And you know, the interesting thing Rich, is the threat landscape. When I talk to friends and people that aren’t in cybersecurity, it’s like, oh, I have this kind of vision of a, of a person in a hoodie, you know, like trying to hack away at trying to get into your data. And yes, that exists. And that’s a real threat. But the big threat is, are these nation-state actors with 1000’s of people, coordinated efforts. And you talked about AI and ML-
Richard Helppie 18:38
Artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Unknown Speaker 18:41
Machine learning, yeah, thank you, Rich, which, you know, again, simply put, allows a known vulnerability to be exploited faster. So basically, what happens in the software world is there are glitches or vulnerabilities to software, meaning they could be exploited. And when a reputable and they all do it, software company recognizes this, they tell people about it, so you can fix it. And so typically, what you saw was software company x says, Hey, this is a vulnerability, everybody that’s running that software patch has that vulnerability, and now the bad actors can exploit that and get your information, right. Well, what’s happened with artificial intelligence and machine learning is the time from known vulnerability to exploit has shortened, so they’re moving faster. So you have more individuals sponsored by nation states moving faster. And so the countermeasure to that is we’re using the good guys are using machine learning and AI to put countermeasures in place so that we can kind of you know, punch and punch back and try to stay ahead of each other.
Richard Helppie 19:43
It’s like the shootout at the OK Corral, being played out in cyberspace at a massive game of spy versus spy in in cyberspace. (Dan: Absolutely ) Amazing. And if we keep the analogy going, it was like, Hey, we know where the hideout of the bad guys are. We’re going to go raid it, from the Old West to, you know the mobsters in Chicago to a modern day criminals, is it hard to find the culprits that are launching the cyber attacks?
Dan Dodson 20:10
So here, here’s the challenge, Rich, so we can track where it’s coming from. We don’t know where it originated, right? Because it can originate somewhere else and bounce around this dark web and then come from country x. But it’s like, I don’t know if that’s where it originated, that now there are there are the government and you’ve heard about these groups or cells, if you were that are caught. And so it’s a confidence level that they believe that this was the set of bad actors that did this. But to say that we know that it was this person in this location. I mean, it’s almost impossible to pinpoint it precisely.
Richard Helppie 20:44
I was talking to a fellow that his job with the Department of Homeland Security was crimes against children. And there was a ring operating in Korea, South Korea, these people that indulged in that horrible crime, they would subscribe using a digital currency like a Bitcoin, the Bitcoin ended up, it had to go into a bank eventually into the local currency. And they intercepted that, that let them back up to the server that let them find who was doing it, and it got them all their subscribers and really sick part about this but also good news for the good guys, is that there was a price for people to view this child pornography, and there was another price if you wanted to contribute; which meant they were perpetuating acts, so some guy sitting in Peoria, Illinois, or Tocumcari, New Mexico, thinking he’s indulging this, it gets a knock on his door because of the great cyber sleuthing that goes on. So we just can’t imagine the cost of that, and I hope that the infrastructure bill, which we’ve covered a couple times now with Dr. Rick Geddes, puts some money behind that.
Dan Dodson 21:52
Yeah, I mean, there there are, I’m glad you mentioned that Rich, there are 1000’s of threats every day that are successfully blocked or diverted by cyber security organizations by businesses themselves, we always hear about the ones that are unsuccessful, but there are countermeasures that are working. There are organizations that are deploying people and technology to fight off these these bad actors. And so it’s not all negative, there is some positive successes as you as you talk about there.
Richard Helppie 22:23
So Dan, in addition to the zero trust, which sounds like a pretty good policy to me, is there any national or perhaps international policies that might be effective? And and if this is part and parcel of the question, it seems it would make sense, there’s got to be coordination amongst nations and amongst businesses, if this is going to work. Is there anything on the horizon or that you recommend that that we ought to be doing?
Dan Dodson 22:48
So one thing is, and I think we’ve actually made strides in this area, Rich, is to share information. The bad guys are sharing information, they are talking about successful exploits. And what we’re starting to see is the good guys share information. In my world there’s an information sharing organization called the Health ICE Act. There’s others for financial services, and it’s an information-sharing collaborative. So those health systems and health care organizations can subscribe to that –Fortified works with them as well– to share information so that we can learn from each other. So I think there’s been progress in there, there’s certainly more progress to be made. And I think the veil of of embarrassment and concern of retaliation from the government is starting to subside. So we see a lot more engagement with the FBI, when we have a bad event that’s all positive, we’ve got to share more information. I think that the coordination between different countries becomes extraordinarily challenging, given the political landscape across the world, you can use your imagination to think through where a lot of these threats are originating, those are the same countries and regions where we have multilayered issues from a political perspective that we’ve got to think through what we’re I do think there’s opportunity, especially in the world I live in, is funding, we have enterprise cybersecurity issues in an SMB budget.
Richard Helppie 24:07
Small and medium sized.
Unknown Speaker 24:08
And I don’t mean it’s really hospital, I’m talking about even the Big Boy. We had all this financial incentive from the government to digitize healthcare, ARRA and high tech and all these policies, which were successful. And look, there’s a lot of debate about whether or not care is more coordinated now or not. There’s pockets of that. That’s kind of a separate debate. But where’s the equal funding and incentive to secure that data? We haven’t seen it.
Richard Helppie 24:31
It’s like we’ve gone to a digital world, and I think we’ve talked about like, what the national, international policies might be. And I like this notion that says, hey, I spotted a bad thing from a bad place and tell everybody, but I also hear what you’re saying is that if that bad actor is a state or a state-sponsored group, they can say they’ve spotted something and make people do things that maybe open up more vulnerability. So I just hope that we can get our best and brightest on this. This is why we need great math education. We need great computer science education, we need to fund those that our universities, our high schools and keep those people in the country. Dan what about individuals? I mean, how do we do our part? I know like, people tell you something as easy as be careful what you click. But, you know, if you were going to look at the listeners to the Common Bridge, viewers of the Common Bridge, and you say, here’s what you need to do today, what would you tell them?
Dan Dodson 25:31
I would tell everybody to first and foremost understand the most vulnerable population, which is the elderly population. And so I’ll tell you a story real very quickly, Rich. So you know, back in the day, my wife, my mother-in-law would got exploited through the mail. So I walk in her house, and she’s got all these, you know, mails to like, donate to things, and she’s given $5 here and $10 here, you know, and that was kind of a common exploit, you know, in the ’90’s, ‘2000’s, right, like, let’s, let’s mail out a bunch of stuff and try to get some money in checks. What that looks like today. And this is a story I heard last week, was an elderly woman got spoofed, which means tricked that Amazon needed her account to return something. And so she clicked the link, she gave the $31 cuz she knew that she had bought something from Amazon, it looked just like Amazon through that malware, they got access to her bank account and transfer $300,000 out of that account, which was her entire life savings. And they tricked her to initiate the trade. So first and foremost, folks that grew up in this digital era, they would raise questions, they would check their Amazon account, they would match the dollar, they don’t return that, you know, but we got to make sure that the most vulnerable understand that these spoofing activities are real, because that’s where they’re targeting these individuals, because they’re the most susceptible. Cyber criminals are lazy, Rich, they’re going to go to the most vulnerable and the easiest. So that’ll be the first thing is, you know I’m very diligent about that. And then for everyone, I would say it said a lot, and but lots of people don’t do it, don’t have the same password for everything. Change your passwords, often. In almost everywhere you could bank, all your social medias, enabled the two-author or multi-factor authentication, you talked about that, get the text in the email, those are things that are extraordinarily important. And I would encourage everybody to do that. And then the last thing is have some common sense about if something’s not right, because we all grew up with the internet, where it was like, Oh, the Russian prince or princess calls you is going to give you you know, $6 million, well, that doesn’t work. And so it’s all these small kind of things that look very close to where you actually and how you actually live your life. And so if you haven’t talked to this organization, you haven’t bought anything there lately, or it doesn’t seem right, it’s probably not. So have this common sense about and perspective about what’s being, you know, emailed to you.
Richard Helppie 27:40
And let me just pile on, there are a couple ways to that people should understand if you didn’t initiate something to your bank, or to PayPal or to Amazon, or to your healthcare provider, or the Social Security Administration, you’re not getting something back, they don’t do it that way. And I just want to amplify, Dan, the point you made about, don’t use the same password, because that username and password that you’ve got on your bank account, the bad guys have that. And what they do is they they just try it on millions of websites to see for open any other doors. So all of your sign on to all of your passwords need to be unique. And there’s software that can do that. Uh, Dan, this has really been insightful. I think you’ve brought to life, a lot of what is a very kind of opaque and esoteric part of the economy. What didn’t we cover that maybe we should have talked about?
Dan Dodson 28:39
Wow, that’s a that’s a great question. (Rich –within the next three hours.) Yeah, that’s right. How much time do I have? Oh, no, it’s, uh, you know, look, I think I think we’ve we’ve covered a lot here today. Rich, I think that there is an opportunity for us to collaborate. I think more as healthcare cyber experts, as we as we talked about, I do think there’s a place and we got to figure out how to do it. And I know, there’s lots of folks on the Hill thinking about it, to help fund cybersecurity at the federal level that’s actually going to drive and reduce risk. That’s key. And I think, you know, the administrations, you know, both past and present, have been thinking about this. But look, I think this is the future of society, it’s not going anywhere. The last comment I would make that you that you barely touched on is there’s 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs open in the world today. We got to start educating our youth, we’ve got to start educating. I’m working with a number of colleges to put certificate programs in place because this isn’t going to go anywhere Rich, and we’ve got to start making sure that in the early in the early years, we’re equipping our people at the personal level to protect themselves but also investing in the future of our country by allowing individuals to learn about cybersecurity and become experts,
Richard Helppie 29:48
Dan, that is a great wrap up, a great summation that look we need to have better policy and better coordination from our government. That’s their job and also that our education system needs to be educating our young people, because these are the jobs of the future. And I would suspect we could build a curriculum at the high school level. And if you want to do that I happen to have one that I work with quite closely. And I’d like to see some Champion cyber security people.
Dan Dodson 30:17
So Rich, I got I gotta add one thing to that. I’d love, we’ll, we’ll talk about that for sure. But the other thing that’s really important, and I’ve talked to a number of universities, you mentioned the SME advisory board, but also the speed to which cybersecurity is changing is faster than the way that the educational system can evolve. So it’s, it’s this cultural problem within the educational system, because if we don’t allow the curriculum to evolve, certainly on an annual basis, it becomes challenging, and then the accreditation and all the things. So it’s a complicated, you know, opportunity for us as a country.
Richard Helppie 30:48
Absolutely. And we’ve talked about education, we’ve got some guests coming up, but that model of someone’s going to go away to four years of college and come out and be ready to work. I mean, it’s bypassed. I look, I can tell you that in my career as a young programmer, computer programmer, there wasn’t a college curriculum to go to, I had to learn it on the job. And, you know, grateful for the people that provided me those opportunities. Dan, this has been fantastic today. Any closing thoughts for our audience?
Dan Dodson 31:19
No, I would just like to, you know, you mentioned the pandemic, at the beginning, I hadn’t had a chance to mention that, you know, we’ve had the honor to work with lots of healthcare organizations. Those those organizations have been through a lot, they protected our community. So thank you to all of the heroes of healthcare and the cyber healthcare experts out there as well. So really appreciated and humbled to be part of the community. So thank you.
Richard Helppie 31:40
So very, very poignant comment and one that everyone should embrace. Brian Peters was our most recent guests and we concluded with a hug a health care worker after you’ve had the vaccine. We’ve been talking today with the Chief Executive Officer of Fortified Health Security, Dan Dodson, about cyber crime, cyber attacks, cyber security around the globe, within businesses, individuals and within the healthcare community. Please subscribe and rate, rate as high as you would please on your favorite podcast channel, Amazon, Apple, Buzzsprout. I-Heart Radio, Spotify, or at YouTube TV, Richard Helppie’s Common Bridge and of course, register for free at RichardHelppie.com. This is Rich Helppie with our guest, Dan Dodson, signing off on the Common Bridge.
Brian Kruger 32:32
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