Cybersecurity in Healthcare: How Social Engineers Target Patient Data and Hospital Operations

Healthcare has become one of the most targeted sectors in cybersecurity, and the reasons are clear. Patient data carries exceptional value on criminal markets, and healthcare organizations face catastrophic consequences when systems fail. Adversaries understand that disrupting care creates real-world harm for patients and operational paralysis for providers, offering attackers leverage that directly impacts patient outcomes and organizational stability.

Major incidents from 2025, including breaches at Yale New Haven Health, Episource, and Blue Shield of California, demonstrate how attackers consistently exploit the same entry points: compromised user accounts and third-party vendor access.

Compounding this exposure, the digital transformation of U.S. healthcare over the past 15 to 20 years has fundamentally reshaped how care is delivered. Clinicians now rely on technology at nearly every decision point. Radiology results, lab work, medication records, and care coordination tools are all accessed in real time. This dependence on continuous system availability has made healthcare operationally reliant on infrastructure and workflows that adversaries increasingly target.

User Risk, Legacy Systems, and the Life-Saving Care Tradeoff

User risk in healthcare is not just about clicking a bad link. It is every action, or inaction, by clinicians, staff, contractors, and third parties that exposes patient data or critical systems to compromise. Attackers exploit clinical pressure and the high-trust culture of care environments to turn routine workflows into breach vectors.

By late 2025, more than 35 million individuals were affected by large healthcare breaches reported to HHS, with the average incident costing healthcare organizations $7.42 million, the highest of any industry. Beyond financial loss, these breaches erode patient trust, invite regulatory scrutiny, and create long-term reputational harm.

User account compromise has emerged as the dominant threat vector, with nearly one-third of healthcare organizations reporting incidents involving compromised user or administrative accounts. Attackers increasingly rely on techniques like MFA fatigue, repeatedly prompting clinicians for authentication approvals during busy shifts until reflexive approval grants access. In high-pressure care environments, these attacks blend seamlessly into normal operations.

Healthcare’s reliance on legacy clinical systems further amplifies user risk. As infrastructure hardens, attackers shift to the path of least resistance, targeting clinicians operating under constant time pressure and access demands. Clinicians once worked on paper and could continue care during system disruptions. Today, technology underpins clinical operations, and when cyberattacks occur, they create immediate operational crises.

Legacy security awareness programs have failed to change user behavior or prepare the workforce against GenAI attacks, leaving organizations exposed to emerging risks. In 2026, user risk remains a central challenge in healthcare cybersecurity because it targets the one element that cannot be patched: human behavior under pressure.

How Social Engineers Exploit Clinical Workflows

Social engineering tactics in healthcare have evolved significantly. Below are common methods targeting large hospitals today.

Multi-Channel Social Engineering Targeting Healthcare Staff

As of September 2025, email remains the most common initial access vector for healthcare data breaches, accounting for 16% of incidents. Whaling targets executives specifically, leveraging their authority to approve high-value transactions or access sensitive systems. With healthcare providers representing 15% of all business email compromise incidents, the sector remains a top target for financially motivated threat groups.  

Modern attacks rarely stop at email. Voice phishing targets nursing stations and front desks, where staff are trained to respond quickly to callers verifying insurance or resolving IT issues. Smishing over SMS and contact via encrypted apps like WhatsApp extend these attacks to personal devices, reaching clinicians in unmonitored moments where urgency and fatigue increase risk.

These layered attacks exploit the speed and trust built into clinical environments. Attackers adapt their approach to each channel, increasing both the likelihood of success and the severity of impact.

Ransomware Delivery

Healthcare is the top target for ransomware attackers, accounting for 17% of attacks across all industries. The average demand is $9.8 million per incident, with some exceeding $100 million. When downtime directly affects patient care, healthcare organizations face intense pressure to restore operations quickly.

The 2024 Change Healthcare attack, which disrupted claims processing for months and exposed data on more than 100 million individuals, began with compromised credentials. In healthcare, ransomware succeeds not just by exploiting technical gaps, but by weaponizing the obligation to protect patients and keep care delivery running.

Third-Party and Contractor Access

Recent hospital breaches have highlighted the growing risk posed by external service providers with insufficient security controls. Vendors, contractors, and partners often operate inside healthcare networks without the same oversight applied to internal staff, creating unmanaged access to sensitive systems and patient data.

In the past 12 months, more than half of healthcare organizations reported a third-party breach, yet 60% still do not routinely monitor third-party access to sensitive information. For attackers, these relationships offer a backdoor past internal defenses.

Insider-Driven Breaches

Importantly, not all healthcare breaches originate from external attackers. Insider threats are among the hardest risks to detect because they operate entirely within trusted access boundaries.  

Whether malicious, negligent, or compromised, insider incidents leverage legitimate credentials and approved workflows. In addition to patient records, these incidents can expose clinical research data, proprietary treatment methodologies, and pharmaceutical or medical device IP. In environments where access is broad and workflows are fluid, harmful activity can blend into normal operations, allowing attackers to move laterally and remain undetected until data is exposed, or care delivery is disrupted.

Preventing Attacks Before They Reach Patients

As Hussein Syed, CISO at RWJBarnabas Health put it during Dune's Securing Healthcare webinar, "Patient safety comes first. That's any health system you walk into; that's what they'll tell you. Patient safety is the number one concern. Everything comes up secondarily.”

Cybersecurity incidents are patient safety events. When systems go down, the consequences extend far beyond financial loss. Delayed procedures, inaccessible medical records, and disrupted care coordination translate directly into patient harm.

Defending against APT groups who study hospital workflows and understand clinical pressure points requires a modern approach to user risk. Dune Security prevents social engineering and insider threats by simulating real-world attacks across email, SMS, voice, video, and encrypted apps like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, and Viber to reveal where users are most vulnerable. The platform continuously scores user risk based on behavior and role, then automatically prioritizes and delivers remediation to reduce exposure before clinical operations are compromised.

Healthcare cybersecurity is a patient safety imperative. Protecting the workforce that delivers care is non-negotiable.