Drivers of escalating healthcare breaches examined

Cybersecurity Dive reports data breaches in the healthcare sector increased by twofold between 2024 and 2025, even as the number of compromised patient records significantly declined.

Ransomware intrusions, third-party risks, and mounting shadow AI usage have driven mounting healthcare breaches, which have increasingly aimed to disrupt operations, findings from a Fortified Health Security report showed. Only 4% of healthcare entities said they were highly confident of their vendor risk evaluations, while only 6% expressed being very confident in facilitating accelerated incident discovery, containment, and recovery. Such findings emphasize the importance of bolstering threat visibility across overlapping technology stacks, raising cybersecurity investments, implementing AI visibility frameworks, and developing cybersecurity programs that could weather escalated turnovers in healthcare.

"Programs designed around perfect staffing conditions rarely survive contact with reality. Strong programs do not assume stability. They assume change and plan for it by strengthening the people who stay, preserving institutional knowledge, and ensuring that capability does not disappear when individuals do," said the report.