Healthcare is under siege. Over the past five years, the sector has seen a 256% rise in cybersecurity breaches, as attackers grow more aggressive, more advanced and more relentless. Ransomware, phishing and supply chain attacks are evolving faster than most security teams can keep up with, and as a result, hospitals, clinics and care facilities are feeling the strain.
The reason? Healthcare is more connected than ever before. From bedside monitors and other internet of medical things (IoMT) devices to digital records and AI-powered diagnostics, technology is now deeply embedded into every aspect of care. This evolving digital footprint creates more opportunities for attackers to get in and increases risk when systems go down.
Breaches are no longer confined to data theft or reputational damage. Recently, cyberattacks have physical, real-world consequences: delayed surgeries, compromised diagnostics, downed of critical systems forcing patients to turn away and more. In a landscape where every second counts, even brief delays in care can turn catastrophic.
Common attack vectors
As healthcare environments expand and interconnect, they also become harder to defend. Cybercriminals are exploiting common vulnerabilities across the ecosystem, including:
- Human error and misconfigurations in cloud services
- Phishing and social engineering targeting staff
- Unpatched software across distributed locations
- Supply chain vulnerabilities from third-party vendors
- Legacy systems, especially operational technology (OT), that were not built with cybersecurity in mind
These aren’t hypothetical concerns. In 2021, a ransomware attack crippled Ireland’s national health service, canceling thousands of appointments and shutting down critical systems. In the U.S., a large-scale study of more than 2,600 hospitals found that disruptions caused by data breaches were followed by a measurable increase in 30-day mortality rates for heart attack patients, effectively erasing a year’s worth of progress in improving outcomes.
The financial toll is severe as well: the average cost of a healthcare data breach is $7.42 million, the highest among any industry for the 14th consecutive year. But the real danger isn’t just the ransom. Increasingly, attackers are pairing encryption with data theft, threatening to leak patient records unless payment is made. And they’re able to do so while remaining undetected, with healthcare data breaches typically lasting 213 days before discovery, nearly a month longer than the average across other industries. That’s seven months of lateral movement, stolen data and potentially compromised backups before the organization knows they’re under attack.
Prevention isn’t enough
Most healthcare or pharma providers already invest heavily in cybersecurity, but many still assume that if they can prevent an attack, then they’re covered. This won’t suffice in today’s threat landscape.
Modern attacks spread fast, disabling recovery systems and encrypting backups before teams can respond. New trends like AI-powered malware are allowing attackers to move even faster and adapt in real time, probing defenses, mimicking trusted traffic and adjusting attack paths mid-strike. They exploit the same complexity that’s meant to keep them out. In these moments, continuity depends on the ability to isolate the damage and bring systems back online fast.
This is where recovery-focused cyber platforms come in. Rather than simply defending against attacks, this approach ensures healthcare operations continue operating even when attackers infiltrate systems. For healthcare providers, this shift from reactive to proactive security may be the difference between life and death.
What healthcare leaders must do now
An immediate cyber recovery-focused approach requires healthcare organizations to rethink their cybersecurity strategy to focus on effective and fast backup and recovery. The main steps to achieving this include:
- Segment and isolate IT/OT systems to limit lateral movement across networks
- Use real-time monitoring, comprehensive visibility tools and anomaly detection across all endpoints, including all OT stations.
- Simplify recovery tools and processes so that even non-experts can trigger system-wide restoration in a matter of seconds.
- Adopt air-gapped, instantly restorable backups that are physically disconnected from operational networks and can’t be encrypted or removed by attackers, ensuring backup integrity.
- Run regular recovery drills not just to prove compliance, but to test real-world readiness
Regulations are catching up and raising the stakes
New regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) updates, General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) demand not only stronger defenses, but proof of rapid, full backup and recovery capability.
Clearly, compliance is now about provable, testable resilience under fire, which many healthcare organizations still lack.
The future of healthcare depends on operational continuity
The best way to protect patient safety is to ensure healthcare never stops. In today’s highly active threat landscape, doing so requires more than just detection and prevention. True resilience means adopting a cyber recovery-focused mindset: a strategy that assumes the worst can actually happen and equips organizations to bounce back within minutes not hours or even days, when it does.
Healthcare and pharma organizations that implement a recovery-focused security approach will be the ones that maintain patient trust and operational continuity.
Cyberattacks are inevitable. Downtime doesn’t have to be.
About Amit Hammer
Amit Hammer is the CEO of Salvador Technologies. He has more than two decades of business and technology leadership experience across multiple industries, beginning his career as an officer in an elite intelligence R&D unit, followed by a decade at Texas Instruments, where he held global leadership roles in connectivity and Internet of Things (IoT). Amit also served as CEO of AI and big data startup Neura, EVP of Operations at Otonomo, and VP of Programs at SolarEdge, among other roles.
