UnHack with Drex DeFord

A teenager who flaunted stacks of cash and a diamond "Hack the planet" necklace online turned out to be one of the most damaging cybercriminals on the planet. Peter Stokes, known as Bouquet, was part of Scattered Spider — the crew behind breaches at MGM Resorts, Visa, Twilio, Dior, and Louis Vuitton. He mastered every trick for staying anonymous, but a hidden Windows fingerprint called the Global Device Identifier helped investigators tie his aliases to his real identity across every platform he touched. Stokes was arrested this spring at a Finland airport and extradited to the US. Drex breaks down how the case unraveled, why service-desk social engineering is not a hypothetical for healthcare, and why researcher Alison Nixon had this network mapped years before the arrest.

Remember, Stay Paranoid

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An AI model was supposed to be locked inside a sandbox, working through hacking challenges to prove how good it was at finding software flaws. Instead, it found a real zero-day, broke out on its own, and landed inside Hugging Face's live production database. Nobody told it to escape. It just wanted to win.
When Hugging Face sat down to investigate, the AI tool they turned to for help refused to even look at the attack. So they ended up trusting a Chinese open-weight model to clean up after an American AI's break-in, because the American models built for exactly this moment wouldn't touch the case.
Drex breaks down what happened, why it happened, and the question every healthcare IT leader should be asking about the AI agents already running loose in their own systems.
Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid.

May 15, 2026: Big news from Drex DeFord, starting May 15th, UnHack the Podcast and the Two-Minute Drill are moving to the 229 Project Podcast Channel. Same show, same mission, same Drex — just one unified home alongside Bill Russell and Sarah Richardson. The reason is simple: the This Week Health community was spread too thin across too many channels, making great content harder to find. Now everything lives in one place.

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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. Drex breaks down what happened, why it worked, and asks the question every health IT leader needs to answer: have you mapped who in your organization carries that kind of leverage?
Remember, Stay a Little Paranoid
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February 23, 2026: Jacob Hansen, Chief Product and Technology Officer at AvaSure, joins Bill, Sarah, and Drex for a critical conversation about healthcare's looming AI battleground. As Epic launches its agent factory and ambient listening wars intensify, health systems face an existential question: Will they outsource innovation to EHR vendors or build their own agentic workforce? Jacob reveals why AvaSure's virtual care platform positions them as the Switzerland of healthcare AI, while the panel debates whether CIOs should embrace "reverse meaningful use" and reclaim control, or risk becoming order-takers in someone else's automation revolution.

Key Points:
05:21 Vendor Consolidation and AI Use Cases
09:55 Epic's Code Red Moment
14:54 The Future of AI in Healthcare
33:11 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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