Reimagining Cyber - real world perspectives on cybersecurity · Reimagining Cyber

AI, Deepfakes & Legacy Systems: 2025 in Review - Ep 181

December 23, 2025·18 min·5 clips

Rob Borrego frames the first half of Reimagining Cyber's 2025 review as a look at how security technology sped up under pressure. He treats the year as a leap forward. Richard Steinan, author of the Security Yearbook, joins to map the rise of AI across the security market. He argues that AI has grown broad enough to justify its own security category. The category is less about one product line than about the guardrails around the technology, which keeps the discussion grounded. From there, the conversation moves to healthcare modernization. Sensonet's CEO explains how hospitals manage, reduce, and monitor cyber risk while keeping patient care moving. An EHR outage can slow orders, push staff into manual procedures, and trigger rerouting before anyone has fully sorted out the cause. In a city, that reroute may be short. In a rural system, it can take hours. Ambulance intake, scheduled procedures, and lab work all get pulled into the same operational mess. The discussion uses that example to show how cyber events and non-cyber outages can look the same once they hit day-to-day operations. It then turns to research. An early study with the Poneman Institute asked whether ransomware and cyberattacks were disrupting care in measurable ways. The survey looked at mortality, diversion, ambulance rerouting, and canceled or suspended procedures. That pushes the topic away from anecdotes and toward evidence from operations. The closing passage widens the lens again to AI, automation, vulnerable legacy systems, and biometric deception. It also lands on the uncomfortable practical question of ransom payment and the gap between policy language and business decisions. The episode closes by pointing toward part two, which shifts from technology to the human side of cyber, including mental health and workforce change.

As heard by us

A grounded review of how AI, outages, and legacy systems reshaped cybersecurity's operating reality.

The review frames cybersecurity as a system under strain, with AI, automation, healthcare modernization, and brittle legacy systems all pulling on the same thread.

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Why you'd press play

You want a grounded review of 2025 cyber without the fluff.

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