Latest cybersecurity reporting from selected sources.

Measure Would Create Federal AI Coordinator, Expand Data Interoperability EffortsA bipartisan House bill would create a federal coordinator to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence, standardized health data and interoperable research platforms in an effort to speed pediatric cancer research, improve clinical trial design and expand treatment options for children.

ARPA-H Program Aims to Speed Up Disease Breakthroughs Using AI-Enabled EcosystemBiomedical research breakthroughs for complex diseases and chronic illnesses can take years to achieve. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is hoping to speed that up ten-fold by creating an artificial intelligence-enabled interoperable research ecosystem.

AI Tool Used to Discover Bugs, Which Included 2 Maximum Severity VulnerabilitiesResearchers at security firm AISLE said they recently identified 38 vulnerabilities, including two maximum-severity zero-day flaws in OpenEMR, an open-source electronic medical record software platform used by about 100,000 healthcare providers globally. OpenEMR has patched the problems.

UPGRADE and DigiSeals Programs at ARPA-H Remain Fully FundedA U.S. federal grant effort to develop autonomous medical device patching platforms for hospitals evaded the budget-cutting knife of the Trump administration. Program boosters hope to automate cyber defenses so that hospitals of any size can more quickly patch vulnerabilities.

Health Researchers Often Overlook Security of Historical DatasetsAn August 2025 ransomware attack on the University of Hawaii Cancer Center's epidemiology division has affected 1.2 million individuals, including personal information such as Social Security numbers of certain research study participants dating back more than 30 years.

Nearly 60% of Tech Students Said They'd Violate HIPAA If the Price Was RightBudding IT insiders can be corrupted into giving up protected health information of a very famous patient, say State University of New York at Buffalo researchers who also found a correlation between an interest in white hat hacking and illegal breaches.

University of Hawaii Cancer Center Paid RansomCancer patients who participated in University of Hawaii Cancer Center studies during the 1990s may soon receive a notification that ransomware hackers stole their data in an August 2025 incident. Experts said the hack spotlights concerning risks involving compromises of medical research data.

The Next Major Cyber Risk Could Come Through a Biological SampleResearchers demonstrated that it is feasible to encode executable payloads into synthetic DNA that, once sequenced and processed, could trigger malware in sequencing software. When a vulnerability in a sequencer becomes a vulnerability in national health or food security, the stakes are existential.

NIH Working on Fixes to Address National Security Risks and Weak Access ControlsThe sensitive health and genomics data of 1 million Americans used by a National Institutes of Health research project could be at risk for access or theft by bad actors, including foreign adversaries, a government watchdog group. Security weaknesses discovered in an audit are being addressed.

Default credentials, weak passwords, misconfigurations and a variety of other security shortcomings are exposing millions of medical devices and their data on the internet, said Soufian El Yadmani, CEO and co-founder of Modat, who shared recent research findings.

Default credentials, weak passwords, misconfigurations and a variety of other security shortcomings are exposing millions of medical devices and their data on the internet, said Soufian El Yadmani, CEO and co-founder of Modat, who shared recent research findings.

Recent advisories from U.S. federal authorities on vulnerabilities in certain operational technology devices underscore the potential security risks that many healthcare providers frequently underestimate, said Sila Özeren, a security research engineer at Picus Security.

Recent advisories from U.S. federal authorities on vulnerabilities in certain operational technology devices underscore the potential security risks that many healthcare providers frequently underestimate, said Sila Özeren, a security research engineer at Picus Security.

Clinical Diagnostics Lab Hack Among Latest Recent Cyberattacks in the NetherlandsA Dutch population health research agency is notifying 485,000 participants of a cervical cancer screening program of a hacking incident at a clinical diagnostics laboratory that potentially compromised patients' personal and health information, including lab test results.

NIH, CMS Project Raises Patient Data Privacy Concerns, Advocates SayThe U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said it will build a data platform "allowing researchers to 'securely'" access data from Medicare and Medicaid claims, patient electronic medical records and consumer wearables to better understand autism spectrum disorder causes and treatments.

Although the National Institutes of Health appears to have scaled back plans to build a national registry to track individuals with autism, the agency's research project still poses critical data privacy concerns, said Ariana Aboulafia and Andrew Crawford of the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Researchers Detail AI's Fabricated Facts in Healthcare, Discuss SolutionsHallucinations in artificial intelligence foundation models are pushing healthcare professionals and technologists to rethink how practitioners can safely use AI. Hallucinated lab result or an erroneous diagnostic recommendation could lead to harmful interventions or missed treatments.

Researcher Says Firm Failed to Secure Sensitive Health Data From Survey FormsAn unsecured database containing 2 terabytes of data allegedly exposed more than 1.6 million clinical research records to the internet, including sensitive personal and medical information of patients, said the security researcher who discovered the lapse. Why does this keep happening?

Lawsuit Claims R.I. Health Information Exchange Retaliated Against 'Whistleblower'The former HIPAA compliance officer of Rhode Island's state health information exchange is suing the organization in a federal lawsuit claiming that she was terminated from her job after blowing the whistle on the HIE's alleged unlawful disclosures of patient information for research purposes.

Fully homomorphic encryption can safeguard highly sensitive health data related to rare diseases, underserved populations and clinical trials as it is shared with medical researchers, said Kurt Rohloff, co-founder and CTO of Duality Technologies, who said projects to apply it are underway right now.