Ochsner Health's Andrew Casazza on When AI Becomes the Hammer Looking for Nails

Andrew Casazza, AVP of Cyber Security Operations at Ochsner Health, explores how healthcare organizations navigate FDA-approved medical devices running on legacy operating systems, implement AI-powered security tools while maintaining HIPAA compliance, and respond to threats that now move from initial compromise to malicious action in seconds rather than hours.

Andrew gives Jack his insights on building effective security programs in heavily regulated industries, emphasizing the importance of visibility, automation with guardrails, and keeping humans in the loop for critical decisions while leveraging AI to handle the speed and scale of modern threats.

Topics discussed:

• Unique security challenges in healthcare environments where medical devices run on legacy operating systems that cannot be easily updated.

• Strategies for monitoring and securing systems that cannot have traditional security agents installed due to FDA regulations and medical certification requirements.

• Leveraging AI and automation in security operations while navigating HIPAA regulations and protecting patient data from external training models.

• Implementing human-in-the-loop approaches where AI performs initial analysis and triage while escalating critical decisions to human analysts.

• Understanding the privacy and compliance implications of AI tools that may use customer data for model training and improvement.

• The dramatic reduction in threat-actor dwell time from hours or days to minutes or seconds.

• Building effective SOAR automation playbooks to handle repetitive cases and reduce noise while focusing attention on bigger threats.

• Establishing appropriate guardrails for AI-powered security tools to prevent unintended consequences while enabling automated response capabilities.

• The importance of being curious and maintaining broad knowledge across multiple domains to become more effective.