Healthcare Cyberattacks Increasing and Having Greater Impact on Patient Care
Cyberattacks on healthcare organizations are continuing to rise, are becoming costlier to resolve, and are increasingly negatively impacting patient care, according to a recent survey conducted on behalf of the cybersecurity firm Proofpoint. The findings were published in the 2026 Ponemon Healthcare Cybersecurity Report.
The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and included 705 responses from IT and IT security practitioners whose responsibilities include setting cybersecurity policies, selecting vendors and contractors, and managing security budgets. The respondents included public healthcare providers (22%), private healthcare providers (18%), healthcare insurers (18%), payers (11%), healthcare insurance companies (10%), with the remainder from life sciences, pharma, and biotechnology companies.
According to the survey, 97% of organizations experienced at least one cyberattack in the past 12 months, with an average of 51 attacks per organization, up from 43 attacks this time last year. In 74% of incidents, the incidents had a negative impact on patient care. The report was focused on four categories of cyberattack: cloud/account compromises, business email compromise, ransomware attacks, and supply chain attacks. Supply chain attacks had the greatest impact on patient care, with 90% of respondents affected by a supply chain attack reporting that it impacted patient care, followed by ransomware attacks (72%), business email compromise incidents (69%), and cloud/account compromises (65%).
Sixty-eight percent of respondents said business email compromise attacks resulted in delays to procedures and tests, 70% of respondents said ransomware attacks resulted in longer patient stays, 59% of respondents said cloud/account compromises resulted in an increase in complications from medical procedures, and 35% of respondents said supply chain attacks resulted in an increased mortality rate.
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These attacks are costly for healthcare organizations. Respondents were asked about the cost of the most expensive cyberattack at their organization in the past 12 months. The average cost of the most expensive attack was $4.2 million, up from $3.9 million in 2025. The most expensive element was disruption to business operations, which cost an average of $1.39 million per incident, up from $1.2 million in 2025.
The survey revealed that healthcare organizations are embracing AI tools, with 45% of respondents confirming that they have embedded AI, 24% in cybersecurity operations and 21% in cybersecurity and patient care; however, utilization often exceeds the ability to govern and secure those tools and platforms. Sixty percent of respondents said that they lacked sufficient controls governing the sensitive data used in AI systems, and while security measures had been implemented, 42% said those measures had not been developed for use with AI platforms. Only one-third (32%) of respondents said they have full visibility into the usage of AI tools within their organization. The biggest perceived AI-specific risks were supply chain risk from AI vendors (40%), data leakage through prompts (36%), AI-generated phishing/social engineering attempts (34%), and malicious or biased outputs that affect care decisions (32%).
While hacking incidents continue to increase, insider risk continues to be a problem in healthcare, with 97% of organizations experiencing at least two data loss or exfiltration incidents in the past 12 months, with an average of 21 incidents at each organization. More than half of respondents (54%) said these incidents impacted patient care, and 56% of respondents said these insider incidents resulted in an increase in mortality rates.
“Cybersecurity incidents are increasingly disrupting clinical operations, consuming organizational resources, and affecting care delivery,” explained Proofpoint. “The healthcare organizations that will be most successful in the years ahead will be those that combine cyber resilience, identity security, human risk management, supply chain security, and AI governance into a unified strategy focused on protecting both operations and patient outcomes.”
