The FBI reported that the healthcare industry faced more cyber threats in 2024 than any other critical infrastructure sector. That same year, Change Healthcare experienced the largest cybersecurity attack in history, which dangerously disrupted healthcare operations on an unprecedented national scale. 74% of providers reported a direct impact on patient care, including delays in authorizations for medically necessary care, and 94% stated that the attack had a financial impact on them.

Healthcare cybersecurity is complex due to virtual care, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, and industry regulations. Healthcare security requires physical and digital protection, especially across the thousands of edge devices used every day. Keep reading to explore why healthcare data is a top priority for cybercriminals, the severe consequences of healthcare data breaches, and how modern organizations are shoring up their defenses.

Why Healthcare Data Is a High-Priority Target

What exactly makes healthcare data such a high-priority target? A perfect storm of high value on the black market, outdated infrastructure, and millions of workers creating identity sprawl. Plus, the rise of virtual telehealth has increased attack surfaces, and constantly changing regulations make it difficult to stay compliant and secure.

The Value of Healthcare Data

Healthcare data is wildly lucrative. It's 10x more valuable on the black market than financial data because it is permanent. A corrupted bank account or stolen credit card can be closed. However, it's much more challenging to update your healthcare records. Cybercriminals receive top dollar for stolen healthcare data, and as more healthcare data goes digital, cybercriminals are lying in wait.

Convoluted Systems Relying on Legacy Infrastructure

Healthcare is a complex, deeply interconnected industry often built on outdated legacy infrastructure. It's highly vulnerable to cyberattacks because outdated technology often lacks vendor support and isn't updated frequently, leaving the door wide open for cybercriminals.

Backdoors are used in 21% of cyber attacks, and unpatched vulnerabilities are a top priority for ransomware attackers. Cybercriminals can infiltrate networks through unpatched software and quickly move laterally throughout the network, escalate privileges, or remain undetected for months.

Outdated healthcare infrastructure contributes to a variety of cyberattacks, such as:

• Backdoor attacks: Attackers use normal security authentication and privileges to gain access.
• Unpatched software attacks: Outdated software lacks crucial security measures to prevent data breaches or malware infections.
• Ransomware: An attack with multiple points of entry that healthcare providers lose crucial data.
• Phishing: Old technology might not have strong proactive controls to identify phishing emails, or employees might not be trained on security awareness.

Plus, it's difficult for old systems to properly integrate into modern technology, potentially creating gaps in the security chain. For example, Richard Parish (Delhi) hospital is a rural healthcare facility that transformed its IT operations across six locations. Located in a small town in Louisiana, their old infrastructure struggled with poor performance, network outages, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and limited budget and resources. RapidScale stepped in to modernize their network infrastructure, transform cybersecurity with managed solutions, and provide 24/7/365 support through an around-the-clock security operation center.

Identity Sprawl Creates Vast Attack Surfaces

Healthcare employs over 22 million workers in America, including surgeons, front desk admins, medical billers, doctors, nurses, janitorial staff, and more. Providers are constantly switching locations, staff are rotating, and communication between care teams is crucial. Healthcare faces vast identity sprawl, which expands the attack surface and provides tons of opportunity for cyberattacks.

Identity sprawl includes:

• Outdated or orphaned identities
• Multiple systems with separate user accounts
• Non-human identities like remote wearable devices

Identities sprawl makes it difficult to regulate exactly who can access healthcare data, which creates the opportunity for cyberattacks involving:

• Lateral movement: An attacker can compromise a low-value account and find many paths to escalate their privileges.
• Credential stuffing: Poor password protection allows cybercriminals to compromise one account and then use the same credentials to attack additional accounts.
• Insider threats: A lack of automated, formal deprovisioning can result in the failure to revoke access for contractors or employees, leaving them to inadvertently or intentionally expose information.

Every identity offers multiple potential entry points for cybercriminals, and as workers transition from remote desks to patient rooms to research labs, they're logging in and out of hundreds of devices a day.

Healthcare Data Volume Grows Exponentially Every Day

Healthcare data accounts for roughly 30% of the global data volume, and this share is only expected to grow. Its compounded annual growth rate is 36%, and as consumer wearables rise in popularity, the average user will be generating huge amounts of individual healthcare data on a daily basis. This creates a significant challenge in storing, accessing, and maintaining security for a vast amount of data that multiple people need to access and collaborate on simultaneously.

The Consequences of Healthcare Cyberattacks

Healthcare cyber attacks are especially devastating. Patients are blocked from potentially life-saving care, medications are delayed, treatment is stalled, and hospital operations can take huge hits. The consequences are severe, and for healthcare, sometimes irreversible. Additionally, as cybercriminals become increasingly organized and sophisticated, attacks are becoming more successful and damaging. For example, state-sponsored criminal rings are leveraging generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to create deepfakes that bypass authentication, as well as AI-powered ransomware that personalizes and accelerates cyberattacks.

Severe Financial Consequences

With Change Healthcare, the organization faced $22 million in ransom demands, substantial regulatory fines, substantial legal fees, significant brand damage, and small practices reaching the brink of closure due to lost revenue and operational standstill. The cost of a data breach in healthcare is double that of the average industry — $10.93 million for healthcare organizations as opposed to $4.1 million on average.

Halted Business Operations

For example, with the Change Healthcare attack, some providers were forced to seek out private loans, and the financial consequences and weeks of standstill were incredibly damaging. Even for a smaller cyberattack, it could be weeks before systems return to business as usual, and in the case of ransomware, files and data could be permanently lost without proper backup and disaster recovery practices.

Loss of Consumer Trust

Trust is vital in healthcare, and a cyberattack quickly damages that trust. Confidential patient-physician information can leak, and people's private medical records can be sold on the black market. It's incredibly difficult to rebuild trust once it has been lost.

Compliance Violations

Data breaches often come with hefty compliance violation fees from GDPR, HIPAA, or a state regulation. The average cost of a HIPAA violation can range from $100 to $150 per patient record exposed, which adds up quickly across millions of patients. Between remediation costs, legal fees, and other damages, the compliance financial side is also catastrophic.

Solutions to Protect Healthcare Data

Healthcare organizations may not be able to rip and replace every single bit of outdated infrastructure overnight or perfectly train 22 million employees in security best practices. However, they can create a multi-layered security program to proactively deter threats, protect personal health information (PHI), and formalize disaster response plans.

Managed Detection and Response (MDR)

MDR safeguards data, users, and machines to ensure compliance and safeguard information. It's proactive 24/7/365 cybersecurity for cloud environments. MDR operates around the clock for proactive threat monitoring, real-time detection, and remediation to minimize business disruptions.

Modern Identity and Access Management (IAM)

Identity as a Service (IDaaS) enables secure and seamless network access for healthcare staff. Instead of relying on human IT administrators for provisioning and deprovisioning, modern IDaaS and IAM solutions offer robust, centralized portals that automate the manual tasks associated with identity security. It helps manage users and devices, making sure people have the least amount of privilege necessary to do their job.

Security Awareness Training

Human error is responsible for 88% of data breaches, and employees are either your first-line defense or your biggest weakness. Standard security awareness training teaches employees the importance of multifactor authentication, how to spot phishing emails, and best practices for securing their devices. It's a foundation of a security-first culture that aims to serve patients and protect their information simultaneously. For example, 45% of organizations reported that the most damaging cyberattack to their business occurred due to phishing, and phishing identification is a core component of security awareness training.

Backup and Disaster Recovery

Even the strongest cybersecurity can fail, and that's where proactive backup and disaster recovery solutions come into play. Backup as a Service manages backups automatically in a third-party location, keeping them safe from cyberattacks, natural disasters, or network outages. With the pay-as-you-go pricing, it's a flexible way to defend data and easily back up sensitive information. Disaster Recovery as a Service also recovers and restores critical business operations to reduce downtime and improve business continuity.

RapidScale for Healthcare Data Security Protection

For modern healthcare organizations, RapidScale helps you modernize your infrastructure to become more responsive, compliant, and secure while reducing your administrative workload. RapidScale provides robust and comprehensive cybersecurity solutions for healthcare organizations, covering everything from security awareness training to managed backups to MDR.

To avoid financial damages, loss of consumer trust, and halted business operations, it's key for healthcare organizations to take a multi-layered and proactive approach to security. Managed solutions from RapidScale help alleviate the manual burden on internal IT teams, freeing up employees to focus on high-level projects while expert security professionals monitor and defend the network 24/7/365. Send our team a message today to explore how we can help.