Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats PDF Free Download
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White Paper
Healthcare
Cybersecurity in
2025: Staying Ahead
of Emerging Threats
CrowdStrike White Paper
Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Summary
Healthcare organizations face an evolving cyber threat landscape in 2025, with ransomware,
identity threats, and medical device vulnerabilities among the most pressing risks. This white
paper provides healthcare cybersecurity leaders with key insights into the most active threats,
their potential impacts, and strategies to mitigate risk and protect your organization.
The five most active threats currently facing the healthcare industry are:
• Ransomware/extortion attacks
• Identity threats, phishing, and social engineering attacks
•
exploitation
• Cloud attacks
• Dark AI attacks
You’ll gain a clear understanding of these threats, their impact, and proactive steps you can
take to help protect patient data and hospital operations.
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Table of Contents
The Top Five Most Active Threats Facing the Healthcare Industry 5
Ransomware/Extortion Attacks 5
Identity Threats, Phishing, and Social Engineering Attacks 7
Internet of Things (IoT)/Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) Device Vulnerability Exploitation 9
Cloud Attacks 11
Dark AI Attacks 13
CrowdStrike Provides Proactive, Resilient Cybersecurity for Healthcare 15
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Healthcare organizations are prime targets for cyberattacks, with sensitive patient data and
critical operations at risk. With modern cyber threats now featuring more “interactive intrusion”
attacks, adversaries mimic legitimate users through hands-on-keyboard actions. In 2024,
CrowdStrike recorded a 35% increase in interactive intrusion campaigns, with healthcare among
the top 10 targets. These breaches can lead to financial and reputational harm while jeopardizing
patient safety, underscoring the urgent need for robust cybersecurity. In November 2024, the
healthcare cyberattacks as “issues of life and death.”
Attacks on healthcare organizations have surged. As of January 2025, the HIPAA Journal reported
The 2024 Ponemon Healthcare Cybersecurity Report revealed that 92% of surveyed healthcare
organizations experienced at least one cyberattack in the past year
78% of organizations hit with ransomware take longer than a week to recover.
In today’s evolving threat landscape, healthcare security leaders must stay ahead of relentless
adversaries by understanding their tactics and strategies aimed at disrupting hospital operations
and stealing sensitive patient data. Compliance with information security standards doesn't
guarantee that your systems are secure. Without proactive measures, hospitals and health
systems remain vulnerable to evolving cyber threats that can disrupt operations and compromise
patient care. To mitigate risk and vulnerabilities, healthcare organizations must execute an
actionable plan that includes AI, partnerships, and alliances between tool vendors to enhance
threat detection and response. This white paper outlines the current threat landscape in
healthcare and provides steps that healthcare cybersecurity executives can take to best address
these threats.
CrowdStrike White Paper
Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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The Top Five Most Active Threats Facing
the Healthcare Industry
1. Ransomware/Extortion Attacks
Threat
Ransomware attacks are increasingly common in healthcare. These attacks encrypt critical systems,
and the financially motivated adversaries that conduct them demand payment to restore operations.
Due to their dependency on continuous uptime, healthcare organizations are particularly vulnerable,
and it’s no wonder that healthcare is the critical infrastructure sector most impacted by these types
leverage “double extortion” techniques. They will first extort the organization to pay a ransom for keys
to decrypt their systems. If that ransom is paid, then they will extort the organization again with the
threat of leaking sensitive data on the dark web. As a result, healthcare organizations need higher levels
of data protection to detect and prevent ransomware attacks, including advanced threat intelligence
and AI-powered defenses.
The combination of ransomware and double extortion is particularly threatening because:
• It negates the effectiveness of having data backups as a sole defense
• It increases potential damages (financial, reputational, regulatory)
• It complicates incident response and recovery processes
to access systems and maintain persistence. Healthcare organizations must be aware of this and take
Impact
• Patient outcomes can be impacted by delayed or postponed treatments
• Breaches of PHI have cascading impacts, from fines to loss of reputation
• Organizations can suffer significant financial impacts, from fines and loss of revenue to recovery
and litigation costs
– The average cost of “recovery” per healthcare breach in 2024 was $2.57 million
– According to the , the average cost of a healthcare data
breach in 2024 was $9.77 million
–
associated with a large breach — the cost of the breach is estimated at $2.457 billion, the
largest healthcare breach cost on record
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Questions to ask yourself:
• How quickly can you detect/evaluate new RMM tools in your environment?
• Do you have access to real-time threat intelligence for vulnerabilities newly exploited by
adversaries attacking healthcare organizations?
• How much visibility do you have into zero-day attacks on externally facing assets, and
how quickly can you respond to them?
• Do you have real-time/proactive responses to anomalous identity behaviors?
• Can your cybersecurity team respond 24/7 to cyber incidents?
Action steps to take:
• Establish a baseline of approved RMM software and expected RMM users in your
organization by collaborating with relevant stakeholders such as IT services. Thoroughly
investigate unexpected RMM tools or users.
• Establish a baseline of expected legitimate RMM tool behavior. Profile normal directory
paths, remote connection domains, remote IP addresses, and files written by RMM tools.
For example, AnyDesk normally writes a file named gcapi.dll; files with other names may
be malicious. Define expected child and grandchild process trees.
• Monitor for known RMM tool-related filenames, file paths, or process names. Though
some adversaries rename RMM tools, less sophisticated adversaries do not.
• Monitor for — or block access to — main ser vice provider domains hosting RMM tools
(e.g., download.teamviewer[.]com).
• Search for artifacts (such as logs) that RMM tools write to disk. For example, AnyDesk
artifacts are written to C:\ProgramData\AnyDesk\ or C:\Users\%Username%\Appdata\
Roaming\AnyDesk\ by default.
• Implement a Zero Trust architecture with strict identity verification, least-privilege
access, and micro-segmentation to contain ransomware through continuous
authentication for all resources.
• Implement a Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework and leverage
CrowdStrike Falcon® Exposure Management to continuously monitor internet-facing
assets and proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate vulnerabilities before attackers
can exploit them.
How to Protect Against Ransomware/Extortion
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Threat
Phishing campaigns remain the top method for attackers to gain initial access. In these campaigns,
adversaries trick employees into revealing their credentials or deploying malware. The CrowdStrike
revealed a 442% increase in phishing attacks from the first to the second
half of 2024 and a 50% increase in access broker activity in 2024, with an average eCrime breakout
time of 48 minutes. Adversaries conducted identity attacks, using social engineering and phishing to
steal credentials. Attackers are no longer breaking in, they’re logging in. Without proper identification
and verification of users, attackers can gain access to your environment and move laterally, often
undetected. Since they use valid credentials, identifying or tracking their movements is often difficult.
IT service desks also are highly susceptible to social engineering attacks, as malicious actors can
manipulate help desk personnel to grant unauthorized access to accounts by posing as legitimate users
with urgent issues. Often, these adversaries use stolen personal information or clever deception tactics
to gain trust and bypass security protocols.
Impact
• In June 2024, Los Angeles County Public Health reported a phishing attack affecting over 200,000
individuals
• Recovery efforts included disabling email accounts, reimaging systems, blocking websites, and
quarantining suspicious emails, severely disrupting operations
• For healthcare providers, these procedures disrupt patient care and incur high costs from downtime
• Without user training and identity protection, these attacks will increase and often remain
undetected until significant damage occurs
Questions to ask yourself:
• Can your identity protection solution proactively stop an attack when risky behavior is
detected?
• Do you have Zero Trust methodology/tools to detect and respond proactively to
suspicious activity?
• Are you alerted to changes in domain admins?
• Have you secured your service accounts, and do you invoke multifactor authentication
(MFA) when they act differently?
How to Defend Against Identity Threats, Phishing, and Social
Engineering Attacks
2. Identity Threats, Phishing, and
Social Engineering Attacks
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Action steps to take:
• Adopt Zero Trust principles to verify access requests and restrict unnecessary
privileges.
• Deploy CrowdStrike Falcon® Identity Protection for identity monitoring.
• Leverage CrowdStrike Falcon® Next-Gen SIEM to monitor user activity.
• Regularly audit access to sensitive systems and create clear insider threat policies.
• Conduct staff training to help employees recognize and report insider risks.
• Give service desk personnel specific training to help them identify the person calling.
• Empower the service desk to refuse password/MFA resets if something seems wrong.
• Use advanced email filtering to block phishing attempts.
• Enable CrowdStrike® Falcon Adversary OverWatch™ for continuous monitoring and
threat hunting.
• Conduct monthly phishing simulations to strengthen staff awareness.
• Train employees to identify and report phishing attempts.
• Enhance visibility with next-generation security information and event management
(SIEM) and identity security.
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Threat
Adversaries are increasingly exploiting connected medical devices (such as pacemakers, insulin pumps,
and infusion pumps) due to weak security measures. These weak security measures can be attributed
operating systems that are difficult to manage. Additionally, many organizations need more visibility to
identify all of these systems, as they can’t protect what they don’t know about. This lack of visibility
gives adversaries significant opportunities to gain footholds in the networks of healthcare organizations.
Impact
• Compromised IoT devices jeopardize patient safety
• These attacks can cause delayed treatments or inaccurate data, which can cause adverse patient
outcomes
•
devices to gain a foothold and move laterally in the organization’s environment
Questions to ask yourself:
• Do you have complete visibility of all of your IoMT devices and understand their
vulnerabilities?
• Can you identify the most vulnerable devices on your network and the steps needed to
remediate vulnerabilities?
• Can you identify IoT/IoMT devices that behave differently than their counterparts?
• Can you detect any of your devices that still have default passwords?
How to Protect IoT and IoMT Devices
3. Internet of Things (IoT)/Internet
of Medical Things (IoMT) Device
Vulnerability Exploitation
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Action steps to take:
• Inventory all IoT and IoMT devices and categorize them based on risk.
• Deploy CrowdStrike Falcon® Insight for IoT for real-time monitoring and response.
• Isolate IoT devices using network segmentation.
• Ensure timely firmware and security patch updates.
• Integrate Falcon Next-Gen SIEM for IoT monitoring.
• Centralize IoT activity logs to detect unauthorized behavior like unusual network traffic
or firmware updates.
• Enforce device-specific authentication measures.
• Review policies/processes for keeping devices up to date and holding device
manufacturers accountable.
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Threat
Cloud attacks are on the rise. As more healthcare organizations move to the cloud, adversaries are
adjusting their methods. Without a robust solution that helps you identify what’s in the cloud and
manage hybrid environments and hybrid cloud infrastructure, you put your organization at risk. As
healthcare organizations migrate to the cloud, cloud security must become a part of their cyber
resiliency efforts for continuity of operations. The complexity of the varied landscape of virtual
machines, containers, and serverless workloads across multi-cloud environments creates challenges
for security teams to protect data and applications. Data loss can be difficult to detect because of the
ephemeral nature of the cloud.
Impact
• Cloud infrastructure opens the door to adversaries and allows attackers to hide and reinfect
on-premises resources.
• Improper container protection can be catastrophic, leaving a backdoor for attackers to reinfect or
regain access
• Data loss can have a significant impact and is difficult to detect in the cloud due to its ephemeral
nature — it can lead to regulatory fines, damaged brand reputation, loss of member trust, and
compliance issues
Questions to ask yourself:
• Does your cloud security posture mangement include CSPM (cloud security posture
management), ASPM (application security posture management), and DSPM (data
security posture management) for all of your cloud workloads?
• Does your cloud security solution have the ability to proactively stop a detected attack?
• Do you have the capabilities to detect and respond to SaaS misconfigurations, attacks,
compromises, or anomalous behavior?
• How are you securing your cloud-native workloads at runtime, managing vulnerabilities,
and enforcing compliance across Kubernetes, serverless, and containerized
environments?
How to Secure Your Cloud Environment
4. Cloud Attacks
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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Action steps to take:
• Deploy CrowdStrike Falcon® Cloud Security for complete visibility into workloads and
container events.
• Secure the entire cloud-native stack across all workloads, containers, and Kubernetes
applications.
• Automate security by detecting and stopping suspicious activity, zero-day attacks, and
risky behavior to stay ahead of threats and reduce the attack surface.
• Protect continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows.
• Ensure that on-premises, hosted, or hybrid cloud environments are properly managed
and secured with full visibility.
• Protect workloads at the speed of DevOps without sacrificing performance.
• Deploy CrowdStrike Falcon® Shield to protect SaaS investments and deployments.
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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5. Dark AI Attacks
Threat
the FBI released a report warning of cybercriminals using AI to craft emails, voicemails,
and even video messages to impersonate trusted individuals and attack organizations. Adversaries
are using AI for cyberattack optimization, automated malware, data manipulation, and data poisoning,
as . AI-generated attacks can take the form of social engineering attacks,
phishing attacks, deepfakes, data poisoning and evasion techniques, malicious generative pre-trained
2024 study of phishing email click-through rates
Impact
• AI-powered attacks on the healthcare sector will escalate in both speed and impact, giving
organizations less time to identify or investigate them
• Without implementing AI-driven counter-adversary detection and response, organizations risk:
– Allowing attackers to gain a foothold in their environments
– Endangering patient outcomes
– Preventing quick resolution or identification to protect themselves and their members
Questions to ask yourself:
• Can your employees determine whether an email reads like a phishing email or was
written with AI?
• How well can you identify and automate responses to unusual account activity?
• Do you have advanced AI-native security tools to detect anomalous/suspicious
patterns?
• Do you have threat intelligence that alerts you to the latest attack patterns, exploits,
and zero-days?
How to Protect Your Environment
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Action steps to take:
• Educate employees about dark AI threats — including how to recognize phishing
attempts and suspicious activities — so they can promptly report potential issues.
• Utilize cybersecurity solutions that are specifically designed to detect and counter
sophisticated AI-powered attacks and are capable of identifying unusual patterns and
anomalies in real time.
• Actively monitor the threat landscape to stay informed about emerging dark AI
techniques and adapt your defenses accordingly.
• Implement robust data protection measures to safeguard sensitive information from
unauthorized access, ensuring proper data encryption and access controls.
• Don't rely on a single security measure — combine multiple layers of protection,
including network monitoring, endpoint security, and identity protection.
• Adopt a “never trust, always verify” approach by limiting access based on user identity
and context, minimizing the potential damage from a breach.
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Healthcare Cybersecurity in 2025: Staying Ahead of Emerging Threats
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About CrowdStrike
CrowdStrike (Nasdaq: CRWD), a global cybersecurity leader, has redefined modern security with the world’s most advanced
cloud-native platform for protecting critical areas of enterprise risk — endpoints and cloud workloads, identity and data.
Powered by the CrowdStrike Security Cloud and world-class AI, the CrowdStrike Falcon® platform leverages real-time
indicators of attack, threat intelligence, evolving adversary tradecraft and enriched telemetry from across the enterprise to
deliver hyper-accurate detections, automated protection and remediation, elite threat hunting and prioritized observability
of vulnerabilities.
Purpose-built in the cloud with a single lightweight-agent architecture, the Falcon platform delivers rapid and scalable
deployment, superior protection and performance, reduced complexity and immediate time-to-value.
CrowdStrike: We stop breaches
Learn more: https://www.crowdstrike.com/
Start a free trial today: https://www.crowdstrike.com/free-trial-guide/
© 2025 CrowdStrike, Inc. All rights reserved.
In 2025, healthcare CISOs will continue to grapple with a dynamically changing threat environment.
Amidst this uncertainty and change, CISOs must stay abreast of proposed rule changes to modify the
The new compliance requirements under the proposed HIPAA rules are expected to bring about
significant costs over the next five years as healthcare organizations invest in updated technologies and
The CrowdStrike Falcon® platform offers an integrated and robust solution for healthcare
cybersecurity. It tackles critical threats like ransomware, insider attacks, and advanced persistent
native technologies, the Falcon platform empowers healthcare organizations to stay ahead of threats,
safeguard patient data, and maintain continuous patient care.
To safeguard your organizations and learn how HIPAA rules might impact you, tune into CrowdStrike’s
webinars and on-demand webcasts. In these events, CrowdStrike experts discuss today's most crucial
cybersecurity topics and explain how the Falcon platform helps healthcare organizations mitigate
threats and stop breaches.
To learn more about CrowdStrike’s specific solutions for the healthcare industry, visit our
healthcare landing page.
To learn more about how CrowdStrike secures healthcare organizations, read the
Proactive, Resilient Cybersecurity for Healthcare white paper.
CrowdStrike Provides Proactive,
Resilient Cybersecurity for Healthcare
