What a Cyberattack Really Costs Healthcare Organizations
When the monitors flicker back to life after a cyberattack, healthcare executives often breathe a sigh of relief. They shouldn’t.
The most devastating impacts of a breach unfold in slow motion, long after the incident response team has packed up. Trust evaporates. Revenue bleeds out. Legal notices arrive in waves. And your carefully cultivated brand becomes synonymous with vulnerability.
In 2024, the average cost of a healthcare breach reached $9.77 million. But that number doesn’t reflect the full impact. It doesn’t include the millions lost in downtime, the months of undetected lateral movement, or the years spent repairing reputation and rebuilding trust.
Most of these losses never show up in the initial breach report. And nearly all of them could have been avoided with a network designed to contain the damage before it spread.
The Financial Fallout
According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, healthcare once again led all industries in breach costs, for the 14th straight year. And that only covers direct damage. When you factor in downtime, lost productivity, diverted patients, and emergency response, the total cost skyrockets.
Here’s where the money goes:
What makes matters worse is that many breaches go undetected for months.
In 2024, the average breach took around 194 days to discover, giving attackers time to move laterally, exfiltrate data, and escalate access undisturbed. The longer a breach goes unnoticed, the more expensive it becomes.
That’s why proactive monitoring and network segmentation are no longer optional. Real-time visibility and early containment are critical to stopping an incident before it becomes a full-blown disaster.
Reputation, Churn, and the Long Game
The financial costs of a breach hit hard, but the reputational damage cuts deeper and lasts longer.
In healthcare, trust is everything. Patients hand over deeply personal information and expect it to be protected. When that trust is broken, it’s not just data that’s lost; it’s confidence in your organization’s ability to keep them safe.
Many patients don’t wait for the next incident.
According to the 2025 Breach Barometer Report, patient churn is a growing consequence of major breaches, especially when care is delayed or privacy is compromised. That kind of response translates to significant revenue loss, particularly in competitive metro areas or specialized care environments.
Then comes the litigation.
Breaches often result in class action lawsuits, especially when PHI is exposed or the organization is slow to notify those affected. Beyond settlements and legal fees, these lawsuits extend media coverage, damage public perception, and invite regulatory scrutiny. Even if operations recover, your brand may not.
And reputation recovery takes more than time. It takes investment.
- Patient reassurance campaigns
- Internal retraining
- Public-facing communications
- Ongoing transparency measures
All of which require resources that could have been used elsewhere.
Worst of all? None of this gets measured in your breach report, but it absolutely shows up on your balance sheet.
The False Economy of Connectivity
Connectivity often gets treated like a commodity, something that just needs to work. If the internet is up and systems are running, it’s considered good enough. In healthcare, that mindset can be dangerous.
Many hospitals and health systems choose the lowest-cost connectivity option. It’s common during new builds, expansions, or EHR rollouts, when budgets are tight and leadership wants to move fast. On paper, it looks efficient. In practice, it creates exposure.
Connectivity shouldn’t be lumped in with water or electricity, and treating it like a commodity is exactly how breaches start. Those early shortcuts carve permanent grooves into your infrastructure:
- No segmentation. Clinical, administrative, and vendor traffic share the same lanes.
- No visibility. You can’t defend what you can’t see.
- No isolation. Once inside, an attacker has the keys to every floor.
That flat design all but guarantees lateral movement. By the time the ransom note flashes on-screen, the real damage (that silent traversal through imaging, EHR, and scheduling systems) has already happened.
The breach didn’t begin with malicious code; it began with the decision to treat connectivity as a commodity.
Smart leaders recognize the pattern. They know the question isn’t if but when a threat will arrive, and that recovery costs, starting around $10 million per incident on average, far exceed the marginal savings of bargain-bin bandwidth.
They invest up front in purpose-built, segmented, and monitored networks that confine attacks to a single segment, provide line-of-sight into every connection and device, and preserve clinical performance while locking down vendor access.
Strategic connectivity moves more than data; it channels risk. Spend slightly more before go-live, and you buy airtight containment, faster recovery, and millions saved on the back end.
Rethink, Rebuild, and Regain Control
By now, the picture is clear: the true cost of a breach goes far beyond the ransom. It’s measured in lost time, lost trust, and lost opportunities.
These outcomes are the result of an environment that let that attack spread. The decisions that shape your network today will determine how much you stand to lose tomorrow.
The good news? You’re not powerless.
The infrastructure choices that created risk can be adapted to control it.
Stay Tuned: In the next part of this series, we’ll move beyond what happens after the breach and focus on what you can do to stop it before it starts. We’ll walk through the key questions healthcare leaders should be asking across clinical, technical, and executive teams to transform your network into a strategic advantage from a potential risk.
It’s time to realize that protecting your organization doesn’t begin with a response plan. It begins with the right foundation.
Learn how to build a secure foundation in Part 4: A Secure Tomorrow Starts Today
