5 Ways to Strengthen Healthcare Cybersecurity Before You’re Attacked
Over the course of this series, we’ve walked you through the breakdown of modern healthcare cyberattacks, from why healthcare is a prime target, to how attackers exploit infrastructure, to the staggering costs when they succeed.
While all these risks are very real, so is your ability to reduce them. And it doesn’t take a total overhaul. It simply takes leadership, clarity, and a few key changes to how your network is designed and managed.
The final part of the series is your guide to practical, strategic steps that strengthen your organization from the inside out. We’ll show you how to turn your network into your strongest line of defense instead of your biggest source of risk.
1. Segment to Strengthen
Draw boundaries that contain breaches and protect care continuity.
Healthcare networks often lack internal barriers, allowing attackers to roam freely across critical systems like EHRs, diagnostic tools, scheduling systems, and billing platforms. This stems from our habit of favoring convenience over containment.
The good news? The solution is a simple shift in how you manage traffic within your environment.
By creating isolated zones for clinical systems, administrative platforms, guest networks, and vendor access, segmentation dramatically reduces how far an attacker can move. Even if a phishing email lands or credentials are compromised, the damage can be contained instead of being catastrophic.
Case in Point: Lehigh Valley Health Network (2023)
In February 2023, the BlackCat (ALPHV) ransomware group breached Delta Medix, a physician group within Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN). Because Delta Medix’s systems were segmented from LVHN’s core infrastructure, the attack was contained; hospital networks and other campuses remained unaffected. While some Delta Medix records were leaked after LVHN refused to pay ransom, patient care across the broader system continued without disruption.
Segmentation gives your teams the confidence that even if something slips through, it will stop where it starts. That’s security by design.
2. Isolate Third-Party Access
Third-party vendors are vital to healthcare, from transcription and billing to diagnostics and cloud services. But when they share the same network as clinical systems, convenience turns into risk.
In 2024, business associates caused 77% of healthcare record breaches, not due to carelessness, but because their access was too open. A compromised vendor should never reach your EHR or diagnostics. Yet in flat networks, that’s exactly what happens.
Isolation fixes this by creating clear boundaries between internal systems and external users, keeping your core infrastructure safe even if a vendor is breached.
Thoughtful isolation can turn a vendor breach into a contained incident instead of a system-wide crisis.
3. Take the Cloud Off the Map
These days, Healthcare depends on the cloud more than ever—EHRs, imaging, diagnostics, scheduling, telehealth—all increasingly off-premises. Yet many connections still run over the public internet. These exposed connections and public paths mean attackers don’t have to break in. They just find what’s already open.
A recent FDA alert revealed vulnerabilities in patient monitors accessible online, allowing remote tampering with real-time data. While focused on IoT, the risk extends to any clinical system exposed to the internet.
Private connectivity changes the game by removing critical services from public view, replacing exposed endpoints with encrypted ones, and creating direct links that never touch open networks.
Cloud adoption doesn’t have to mean increased exposure. With private connectivity and thoughtful segmentation, you can protect what matters most while still delivering the performance and flexibility your clinical teams rely on.
4. Visibility and Control
The longer a breach goes undetected, the harder and costlier it is to contain.
In 2024, healthcare took an average of 194 days to spot. That’s over six months of unnoticed lateral movement and data theft. Attackers exploit this delay, thriving where traffic isn’t monitored, logs are incomplete, and suspicious activity blends in.
Real visibility changes the game. It means knowing who’s on your network, what they’re doing, and whether it’s expected, before the breach escalates.
In complex healthcare environments, where data flows nonstop across devices and cloud platforms, your best defense is not more alerts, but smarter monitoring.
Visibility turns noise into a signal. It gives your team the clarity to act quickly and the insight to act effectively. The faster you see a threat, the faster you contain and remediate it.
5. Simplify to Secure
In complex healthcare environments, the chaos after a breach often causes more damage than the breach itself. How many vendors do you call? How many platforms do you juggle? How many teams handle pieces of the problem?
This complexity hides risk. Multiple carriers, fragmented infrastructure, and siloed support slow response when every second counts, and create blind spots in accountability.
A consolidated network architecture centralizes responsibility. It puts all your connections (cloud, data center, vendor, office, SaaS) onto a single, segmented foundation with one support team, one bill, and one source of truth.
Wherever possible, unify cloud, WAN, and internet traffic under a single provider. Replace fragmented support with centralized monitoring and provisioning. Eliminate finger-pointing in a crisis, so ownership is clear when it matters most, enabling faster response, reduced risk, and uninterrupted patient care.
From Uncertainty to Confidence
Across this series, we’ve shown why healthcare is being targeted, how attackers move through networks, what a breach really costs, and—most importantly—what can be done to stop it.
You’ve seen the problems: flat networks, shared access, public exposure, and siloed accountability. You’ve also seen the solutions: segmentation, isolation, private connectivity, and visibility that turns uncertainty into control.
If your infrastructure shows signs of the vulnerabilities we’ve outlined, now is the time to make changes.
That’s where Massive Networks can step in.
Our approach integrates segmentation as a core part of every deployment—isolating critical systems, limiting lateral movement, and containing breaches before they spread.
With One Pipe Multi-Connect, we eliminate vendor complexity by consolidating all your connections (cloud, WAN, internet, and SaaS) onto a single, secure, and segmented platform. This means one bill, one support team, and simplified management without sacrificing flexibility or control.
Our Cloud Connect solution provides the industry’s best end-to-end private cloud connectivity, ensuring your clinical workloads stay secure, performant, and compliant, bypassing the public internet entirely.
Combined with our proactive monitoring, you gain end-to-end insight that empowers your team to detect, analyze, and respond to threats faster and more effectively.
Together, these solutions allow you to protect what matters most, patient care.
We’ll help you design a network to protect what matters.
