The Catastrophe That Trust Could Have Prevented
A ransomware attack didn’t just expose Ascension’s systems; it revealed how executives prioritized efficiency over trust, and patients paid the price.
How Ascension Failed to Manufacture Trust (and How Patients Pay the Price)
To the Reader
This piece responds to Ars Technica's "How Weak Passwords and Other Failings Led to the Catastrophic Breach of Ascension." That story frames the breach as a technical lapse, a narrative of weak passwords, legacy protocols, and misconfigured systems that reads like a cybersecurity postmortem from any of the last two decades. Here we reframe it: breaches are never merely technical accidents waiting to happen. They are manufactured through deliberate management strategy, carefully constructed liability shields, and systemic incentives that trade away trust for short-term efficiency. What follows is an examination of how trust should have been manufactured at Ascension, why it wasn't, and why these failures continue to recur across industries with clockwork predictability.
The technical details of the Ascension breach, the contractor's laptop, the malicious link, and the Kerberoasting attack are symptoms…
