Why healthcare breaches are rising, recovery is harder, and credentials are at the center of it all.
Healthcare organizations didn’t experience fewer cyber incidents last year — they experienced many more of them.
According to healthcare breach data analyzed by Fortified Health Security, reported breaches increased from 237 incidents in 2024 to 502 breaches in 2025, a 112% year-over-year increase. At the same time, the total number of patient records exposed dropped sharply.
That combination tells an important story. Healthcare credential-based attacks have become the most common way attackers gain access to hospitals and healthcare systems. Instead of relying on massive data exfiltration or sophisticated exploits, attackers are abusing something far simpler: valid credentials.
“In healthcare environments, identity failures almost always come down to compromised credentials — reused passwords, stolen logins, and authentication attackers can quietly abuse.”
Once inside, attackers don’t need to move fast or make noise. They can blend in, move laterally, and wait for the right moment to escalate.
For healthcare security teams, this shift has turned cybersecurity from a periodic crisis into a constant endurance test.
At first glance, fewer exposed records might look like progress. In practice, the surge in breach frequency has created a different and more exhausting kind of risk.
Each incident still demands investigation, response coordination, documentation, and recovery. Even “small” breaches pull security, IT, compliance, and clinical operations into disruption mode. When this happens repeatedly, teams lose the time and space needed to get ahead of risk.
This pattern reflects a change in attacker priorities. Instead of focusing on immediate data exfiltration, attackers are prioritizing access. Once inside with legitimate credentials, they can move laterally, harvest additional accounts, or wait for the right moment to escalate.
Email remains the most reliable entry point for credential-based attacks in healthcare.
Fortified’s analysis shows that email-related breaches more than tripled in a single year, rising from 39 incidents in 2024 to 123 breaches in 2025. These incidents were driven largely by phishing, credential misuse, and misdirected communications.
What’s changed is how attackers use email access. A compromised inbox is no longer just a launchpad for phishing. It often enables:
In healthcare environments, where email is tightly woven into clinical, administrative, and vendor workflows, inbox access frequently unlocks far more than messages. Email has effectively become an authentication layer — and compromised passwords are the key.
Traditional hacking and IT incidents are also rising — not because systems are unpatched, but because authentication is being abused.
Fortified reports that hacking and IT incidents more than doubled year over year, driven in part by credential theft, MFA bypass activity, and abuse of remote access technologies like VPNs and RDP.
When attackers authenticate using real usernames and passwords, most security tools treat the activity as legitimate. There is no exploit to flag and no malware signature to catch. As a result, credential-based attacks often go undetected until attackers have already established persistence or begun lateral movement.
This is why passwords remain such a powerful attack vector — they still work.
Healthcare organizations have invested heavily in security awareness training, and that progress matters. But training alone cannot solve the credential problem.
Unauthorized access and disclosure incidents continued to rise, often tied to workforce errors and misuse of access rather than malicious insiders. This doesn’t reflect careless employees. It reflects invisible password exposure.
Training cannot prevent:
Even well-trained users rarely know when their passwords have already been compromised elsewhere. This is why compromised credentials remain one of the most reliable ways into healthcare networks. For background, Enzoic explains this clearly in its overview of how credential leaks fuel cyberattacks.
This credential-driven reality helps explain a troubling confidence gap across healthcare.
Only 6% of healthcare organizations say they are very confident in their ability to detect, contain, and recover from a cyber incident. Most report being only somewhat confident — a sign that response capabilities exist, but early visibility is missing.
Healthcare security teams are not under-tooled. They are under-informed. Without visibility into which credentials are already exposed, detection often starts too late — after access has already been abused.
Credential risk doesn’t stop with employees.
Healthcare organizations depend on a growing ecosystem of vendors, partners, and service providers, all of whom require access to systems and data. Fortified’s survey data shows that only 4% of healthcare leaders are very confident their third-party risk assessments reflect real-world risk, while 29% say they are not confident at all.
Shared credentials, reused passwords, and vendor accounts exposed in unrelated breaches can quietly create new entry points into healthcare environments. Every third-party login inherits the organization’s password risk — whether security teams realize it or not.
The rapid adoption of AI tools has added another layer of exposure. Fortified identifies Shadow AI as one of the most underestimated risks facing healthcare today, noting that unsanctioned AI use can quietly exfiltrate sensitive data.
What’s often overlooked is the credential dimension. Employees frequently access AI tools using the same usernames, passwords, or SSO credentials they use elsewhere. Compromised credentials don’t just enable system access — they can open new external data pathways.
Shadow AI isn’t only a governance issue. It’s another example of how credential reuse expands the attack surface.
High-profile healthcare incidents continue to follow a familiar pattern. Attacks rarely start loud.
Password spraying, reused credentials, and authentication abuse often appear well before ransomware deployment or operational disruption. In many cases, early warning signs exist — but they are difficult to see without credential-specific visibility.
Once attackers escalate, recovery timelines stretch into weeks, not days. The lesson isn’t that defenses failed. It’s that password exposure wasn’t visible early enough.
Reducing breach impact in healthcare now depends on asking different questions:
Answering these questions requires visibility. Approaches like Active Directory password monitoring help security teams identify credential exposure before authentication is misused.
For organizations looking to assess exposure quickly, Enzoic’s password auditor provides a way to identify weak and compromised passwords already in use.
Healthcare environments are complex, interconnected, and increasingly digital. Attackers take advantage of that complexity by choosing the simplest path available.
That path is still reused, exposed passwords.
Healthcare cybersecurity gets stronger when teams can see credential risk early, understand where exposure exists, and act before access is abused. In a landscape defined by more frequent breaches and less recovery time, visibility into compromised credentials is no longer optional — it’s foundational.
See how exposed passwords contribute to healthcare breaches