The Cost of Cyberattacks in Healthcare and How to Prevent Them

Healthcare organizations have accelerated digital transformation across electronic health records, connected medical devices, telehealth, insurance workflows and cloud-based services. This digitization improves access to care and operational efficiency, but it also expands the attack surface.

The cost of cyberattacks in healthcare is especially high because a single incident can affect more than IT systems. Cyberattacks can delay treatment, disrupt prescriptions and insurance claims, expose protected health information (PHI), trigger legal obligations and damage patient trust. This blog post explains why these attacks are so dangerous, what drives healthcare cyberattack costs and which prevention and recovery measures can reduce the impact.

Say No to Ransoms with NAKIVO

Use backups for fast data recovery after ransomware attacks. Multiple recovery options, immutable local and cloud storage, backup malware scan and more.

DISCOVER SOLUTION

Why Cyberattacks in Healthcare Are So Dangerous

Healthcare organizations operate under a different risk profile than most industries. When systems fail in retail, finance or manufacturing, the primary consequences are often financial or operational. In healthcare, downtime can affect clinical decisions, emergency response and patient outcomes.

Hospitals and clinics rely on interconnected systems to coordinate care, including electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), laboratory systems, imaging platforms, medication dispensing tools and connected devices such as ventilators, infusion pumps, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines and heart monitors. If malware disables one critical system, the disruption can spread across departments.

Healthcare cyberattacks can lead to:

• Delayed or canceled surgeries
• Ambulance diversions
• Interrupted access to digital patient records
• Delayed diagnostics and lab results
• Medication dispensing delays
• Manual workflows that slow down clinical teams

Sensitive patient data also increases the stakes. Medical records can include identity details, insurance numbers, medical history, prescriptions, billing information and family contact details. Attackers can use this information for identity theft, insurance fraud, illegal prescription activity and more convincing follow-up attacks.

Downtime compounds these risks. When staff shift to paper charts, manual orders and offline coordination, the entire facility slows down. The patient-safety impact is what makes cybersecurity threats in healthcare more severe than many other business risks.

The Real Cost of Cyberattacks in Healthcare

Healthcare cyberattack costs include far more than ransom demands. The total impact can combine incident response, data recovery, operational downtime, clinical disruption, regulatory exposure, litigation, reputational damage and long-term security remediation.

The healthcare data breach cost remains among the highest across industries. IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report lists healthcare as the most expensive industry for breaches for the 14th consecutive year, with an average healthcare breach cost of USD 7.42 million and an average identification-and-containment timeline of 279 days.

The cost of cyberattacks in healthcare typically includes:

• Direct response costs: Forensics, emergency cybersecurity support, containment, malware removal, system rebuilds and data recovery.
• Operational disruption: Canceled appointments, delayed billing, postponed procedures, reduced clinical capacity and overtime for recovery teams.
• Clinical impact: Delayed diagnostics, disrupted prescriptions, ambulance diversion and slower patient intake.
• Regulatory and legal exposure: Breach notification, privacy investigations, potential penalties and lawsuits.
• Ransom and extortion pressure: Payment demands for decryption, non-disclosure of stolen data or both.
• Reputational damage: Patient churn, partner concerns and reduced confidence from referring physicians or payers.

The cost of ransomware attacks in healthcare can be especially severe because attackers often combine encryption with data theft. Even if an organization pays, there is no guarantee that systems will be restored quickly or that stolen data will not be leaked later. Paying also encourages additional attacks and should not replace a tested recovery strategy.

Costs for prevention are usually more predictable than the costs of recovery after a major incident. Security controls, backup infrastructure, testing, vendor oversight and staff training require investment, but they can reduce downtime, limit lateral movement and support faster restoration when an incident occurs.

Real-World Healthcare Cyberattack Examples

The following incidents show how healthcare cyberattacks can disrupt national infrastructure, regional care delivery and patient-data protection.

Change Healthcare attack (2024)

The Change Healthcare attack became one of the most consequential healthcare cyberattacks in the United States. In February 2024, attackers associated with ALPHV/BlackCat gained access using compromised credentials and a remote access portal that lacked multi-factor authentication (MFA). Change Healthcare later confirmed a network interruption that disrupted claims processing, pharmacy transactions and other backend services across the healthcare system.

The breach impact estimate increased after the original draft was written. As of August 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services breach list showed that the incident affected approximately 192.7 million people, making it the largest healthcare data breach reported in the United States to date. Exposed information was believed to include health insurance member IDs, patient diagnoses, treatment information, Social Security numbers and billing codes.

The company paid a USD 22 million ransom, but public reporting and testimony showed that the payment did not eliminate the recovery burden or data-exposure risk. Providers faced cash-flow problems, claim delays, prescription disruptions and administrative backlogs for months.

NHS ransomware outages

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS) has experienced multiple cyber incidents that show how ransomware can affect care delivery at scale. During the 2017 WannaCry attack, at least 81 NHS trusts and 603 primary care and other NHS organizations were affected. NHS England identified 6,912 canceled appointments and estimated that more than 19,000 appointments would have been canceled in total. The Department of Health and Social Care later estimated the cost at £92 million, including lost output and IT recovery costs.

More recently, the June 2024 ransomware attack against Synnovis, a company working with major London hospitals, caused significant disruption to blood testing and other pathology services. NHS England reported canceled appointments and operations in southeast London, and Synnovis stated that the attack reduced its capacity to process samples.

These incidents show that healthcare cybersecurity risks extend beyond individual hospitals. A single shared service, pathology provider or technology supplier can disrupt care across multiple organizations.

SingHealth data breach

The 2018 SingHealth breach in Singapore shows that healthcare cyberattacks are not limited to ransomware and downtime. Attackers exfiltrated personal particulars for about 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics between May 2015 and July 2018. They also accessed records of dispensed medication for about 160,000 patients.

Singapore’s Ministry of Health reported that diagnosis details, test results and doctors’ notes were not breached, and healthcare services were not disrupted. Even without operational downtime, the incident remains a significant example of how valuable healthcare data is to sophisticated attackers.

Most Common Cyberattacks Targeting Healthcare Today

Cybersecurity threats in healthcare usually exploit the same weak points found in other industries: Credentials, email, unpatched systems, overprivileged access and third-party dependencies. The difference is that healthcare environments are harder to secure because they combine legacy systems, clinical uptime requirements, connected medical devices and sensitive patient data.

Ransomware

Ransomware remains one of the most damaging threats to healthcare systems. Ransomware as a service (RaaS) has lowered the barrier for attackers, while double-extortion tactics increase pressure by combining encryption with data theft.

A typical healthcare ransomware attack can include the following steps:

1. Gain initial access through phishing, stolen credentials, exposed virtual private network (VPN) or remote desktop protocol (RDP) services or unpatched servers.
2. Escalate privileges and move laterally across the network.
3. Disable security tools, delete shadow copies or target backups.
4. Encrypt data on servers, EHR/EMR systems, file shares, imaging systems or connected workloads.
5. Demand payment for decryption, non-disclosure of stolen data or both.

Large-scale data theft attacks focus on stealing sensitive patient data, rather than encryption or disruption. This type of healthcare cybersecurity attack is focused on insurance fraud, identity theft, nation-state espionage and black-market sale of medical records and other protected health information.

Ransomware does not always “destroy” data permanently, but it can make systems unavailable, corrupt files, delete recovery points and disrupt operations until clean backups or replicas are restored. This is why backup isolation, immutability and recovery testing are essential.

Supply chain attacks

Healthcare organizations depend on third-party vendors for billing, pathology services, radiology systems, cloud-hosted applications, medical devices, managed IT services and network equipment. This dependency creates supply chain risk because one compromised provider can affect many healthcare customers.

Supply chain attacks can involve:

• Compromised software updates
• Hijacked remote access accounts
• Backdoors in vendor systems
• Ransomware spreading from a managed service provider or shared platform
• Data theft from billing, claims, pathology or cloud-service providers

Hospitals may have limited visibility into vendor security practices, but attackers understand these dependencies. A single weak vendor can create a path into patient data, claims workflows or clinical services across an entire region.

Phishing, BEC and credential theft

Phishing is still one of the easiest ways into healthcare networks. Attackers send fraudulent emails that push users to open malicious attachments, click links or enter credentials on fake login pages. Healthcare staff are frequent targets because they manage urgent communications from patients, vendors, insurers, labs and internal departments.

Business email compromise (BEC) is a more targeted form of email fraud. In BEC attacks, threat actors impersonate executives, suppliers, payers or trusted partners to redirect payments, request sensitive files or trick employees into approving fraudulent activity.

Stolen credentials can also be used to access EHR/EMR systems, billing platforms, cloud services, virtualization infrastructure or remote access portals. Without MFA, least-privilege access and monitoring, one compromised account can become the starting point for ransomware deployment or data theft.

IoT & medical device exploits

Hospitals use thousands of connected devices, including infusion pumps, patient monitors, computed tomography (CT) scanners, MRI machines, ventilators, nurse-call systems and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) workstations. Many are part of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), the healthcare-specific category of connected devices used for monitoring, diagnostics and care delivery.

These systems may be difficult to patch because they support clinical workflows, rely on specialized firmware or must meet vendor certification requirements. Attackers can exploit hardcoded passwords, vulnerable firmware, unencrypted protocols and exposed services such as Server Message Block (SMB), RDP or Telnet.

Attackers exploit hardcoded passwords, unencrypted protocols, vulnerable firmware and exposed services (SMB, RDP, Telnet). In most cases, attackers don’t target the devices themselves — they use them as entry points for further lateral movement. Attackers use these devices as a low-security entry point into the secure hospital network. Next, ransomware can be deployed to destroy data.

In many cases, attackers do not need to control the device’s medical function directly. They can use poorly secured devices as footholds for persistence, lateral movement, reconnaissance and eventual ransomware deployment.

How to Prevent Cyberattacks in Healthcare

Healthcare cybersecurity should reduce both the likelihood and the impact of attacks. No single tool can prevent every incident, but layered controls can contain threats before they become clinical or financial crises.

To prevent cyberattacks in healthcare, organizations should prioritize the following measures:

1. Strengthen identity security. Require MFA for email, remote access, privileged accounts, cloud services and administrative consoles. Use role-based access control (RBAC) and least-privilege permissions so users only have access to the systems and data they need.
2. Protect endpoints and servers. Deploy antivirus software, endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools and behavioral monitoring to detect suspicious activity. Extend coverage to servers, virtual machines, cloud workloads and endpoints used by clinical and administrative staff.
3. Secure email and collaboration tools. Use anti-spam filtering, phishing protection, malicious attachment scanning, domain authentication and user reporting workflows.
4. Patch and harden systems. Apply security updates regularly to operating systems, applications, hypervisors, network devices and internet-facing services. Prioritize known exploited vulnerabilities and externally exposed systems.
5. Segment the network. Separate clinical systems, administrative networks, guest Wi-Fi, medical devices, backup infrastructure and management interfaces. Segmentation limits lateral movement when an account or endpoint is compromised.
6. Secure medical and IoMT devices. Maintain an inventory of connected devices, track firmware versions, restrict remote access, disable unnecessary services and isolate devices that cannot be patched quickly.
7. Train users regularly. Run security awareness training that reflects healthcare workflows, including phishing, BEC, suspicious attachments, credential theft and urgent-payment scams. Make reporting suspicious activity simple and non-punitive.
8. Monitor the environment. Use centralized logging, anomaly detection, security information and event management (SIEM) tools or managed detection services to monitor your infrastructure and detect unusual behavior early.
9. Assess third-party risk. Review vendor access, security requirements, breach notification terms and recovery expectations for critical providers such as billing, pathology, cloud, EHR/EMR and managed IT vendors.
10. Prepare response and recovery plans. Maintain incident response and disaster recovery plans that define roles, escalation paths, communication steps, containment actions and recovery priorities. Test these plans regularly.

How Backup and Disaster Recovery Reduce Cyberattack Costs

Backup and disaster recovery do not stop the initial intrusion, but they can significantly reduce healthcare cyberattack costs after an incident. Clean, recoverable backups can help organizations avoid ransom dependency, reduce downtime and restore critical services in a controlled sequence.

A healthcare recovery strategy should include:

• Regular backups for critical systems, including physical servers, virtual machines, databases, file shares, EHR/EMR dependencies and cloud workloads
• Backup scheduling and retention policies aligned with clinical, legal and operational requirements
• Immutable or isolated backup copies that attackers cannot modify or delete from production credentials
• The 3-2-1 backup rule, with multiple backup copies across different storage types and at least one offsite or isolated copy
• Recovery testing to confirm that backups can be restored within acceptable recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs)
• Documented recovery workflows for ransomware, data corruption, data-center outage, vendor outage and cloud-service disruption scenarios

Incident response and disaster recovery plans should work together. The incident response plan should explain how to detect, contain and report a cyberattack. The disaster recovery plan should define how to restore priority workloads, who approves failover or restoration, how clinical teams operate during downtime and how recovered systems are validated before returning to production.

Preventive healthcare cybersecurity costs are usually easier to plan than the financial, legal and patient-care consequences of a major cyberattack. The most resilient organizations invest before an incident, test recovery before they need it and treat backup and disaster recovery as part of patient-safety planning.

Conclusion

Healthcare organizations must protect digital systems with the same urgency they apply to clinical operations. Cyberattacks can interrupt care, expose sensitive data, delay revenue cycles and create long-term trust issues with patients, partners and regulators.

The most effective strategy is layered: Strong identity controls, email security, patching, network segmentation, medical-device protection, vendor oversight, staff training, monitoring, incident response and tested backup and disaster recovery. These measures cannot eliminate every threat, but they can reduce the cost of cyberattacks in healthcare and help organizations recover faster when incidents occur.

Try NAKIVO Backup & Replication

Get a free trial to explore all the solution’s data protection capabilities. 15 days for free. Zero feature or capacity limitations. No credit card required.

TRY FOR FREE