Hey everyone, I'm Drex, and this is The Two Minute Drill, where we do at least three stories, at least two times a week, all part of one great community, the 229 Cyber and Risk Community, here at This Week Health. ORDR is the exclusive sponsor of The Two Minute Drill. ORDR's health care's connected asset visibility and security company.

See every asset and protect against threats. ORDR. org. Order is a great way to find and eliminate blind spots. Find out more at thisweekhealth. com slash order. That's O R D R thisweekhealth. com slash order. Thanks for being with me today. Here's some stuff you might want to know about. Just a quick update on the Ascension Cyber event, since that's what they're calling it now.

The folks at Ascension have received some compliments on transparency from the American Hospital Association and others, saying they've been working well with patients and providers in their communities, keeping them up to date on their recovery status. There's another story at ThisWeekHealth. com slash news that discusses new class action lawsuits in both Texas and Illinois.

Both accuse Ascension of being negligent and not encrypting data. For Ascension's part, they've not confirmed whether or not patient data was even compromised. For my part, I'll tell you that if you go to the ascension. org page, it's no longer easy to find the sub page with the security updates. So if you're interested, you should bookmark ascension.

org slash cybersecurity dash event. Otherwise you'll have a tougher time finding the information you're looking for. And the Department of Health and Human Services is launching a 50 million program to fund cybersecurity tools to protect hospitals. The program goes by the acronym UPGRADE, which is somehow extracted from the full name of the initiative, the Universal Patching and Remediation for Autonomous Defense Program, which makes me wonder what they're feeding the government's full time acronym production team.

Nonetheless, the program will be run by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, who's soliciting proposals from the private sector to create a software platform and system to auto detect vulnerabilities. And as an aside, I feel like there's already several commercial off the shelf products that do this.

They're also talking about developing digital replicas of medical equipment that can be used to test patches prior to live deployment. The pessimist in me says this is likely 50 million that will be spent on researching how to make healthcare more secure. So for those of you who've been messaging me about this story, I'd say don't get too excited about this being a funding source to health systems who need money to actually become more secure now, because I don't think this is that.

Kevin Mandia will remain as an advisor to the company. He's a trailblazer, and we're all probably a little better off because of his work. I hope you enjoy your retirement, or whatever's next for you, Kevin. Thanks again to our partner, ORDER, the exclusive sponsor of the 2 Minute Drill. ORDER continuously identifies and classifies hard to find, unmanaged assets, eliminating blind spots.

Check out ORDER AI Chasm, it's available now in the AWS Marketplace. I was asked about mentoring the other day, and one way you can help mentor your team is by helping them keep up to date on the latest cyber news. And one way to do that is by sharing the 2 Minute Drill. It's really easy, just like and forward this LinkedIn post to your team, Or tell them they can listen wherever they get their podcasts.

Just search for This Week Health Newsroom, and then as they say, smash the like and follow button. And that's it for the Two Minute Drill. Thanks for your time today. Stay a little paranoid. I'll see you around campus.