Gopal Sarma and Kathleen Fisher
In February 2024, a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare disrupted medical claims processing for nearly half of all U.S. health care transactions. The breach cost UnitedHealth Group over $2.8 billion, exposed the personal data of 190 million Americans, and forced hospitals nationwide to delay patient care. The cause? A remote access portal without multi-factor authentication. As one senator put it: “This hack could have been stopped with cybersecurity 101.”
This attack illustrates a broader pattern. Critical infrastructure depends on complex systems with sprawling attack surfaces—misconfigurations, excessive privileges, inadequate monitoring, and software vulnerabilities—and attackers are exploiting these weaknesses faster than defenders can address them. Artificial intelligence is accelerating this dynamic: The same technology that helps developers build applications faster also enables attackers to find and exploit flaws more quickly. According to Google’s Mandiant Threat Intelligence, the average time-to-exploit for vulnerabilities dropped from 63 days in 2018–2019 to just five days in 2023. Some claim that AI systems can now generate working exploits as quickly as 15 minutes following a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) disclosure, a standardized public announcement of a specific software vulnerability.
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