Healthcare organizations operate in one of the most operationally fragile cybersecurity environments of any industry. They manage highly sensitive patient data, support life-critical systems, and rely on complex, interconnected infrastructure that often includes legacy technology and unmanaged devices. At the same time, they remain a prime target for ransomware groups, credential theft campaigns, and data extortion operations.
The Picus Blue Report 2025 shows that cybersecurity performance across the Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals sector continues to improve, but the data tells a more layered story than surface-level progress suggests. While regulatory pressure, ransomware exposure, and increased security investment have driven meaningful gains, the findings show that strong prevention metrics alone do not guarantee real-world protection without continuous validation.
In 2025, Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals emerged as the top-performing industry in prevention effectiveness, achieving an 83% prevention score, the highest across all sectors. This continues the strong upward trend observed in 2024 and reflects sustained investment in endpoint protection, network controls, and security validation initiatives.
This performance suggests that healthcare organizations are taking threat prevention seriously, driven in part by the financial and operational consequences of ransomware and the regulatory scrutiny surrounding patient data. Compared to many other industries, healthcare has made tangible progress in hardening defenses and reducing exposure to common attack paths.
However, the Blue Report 2025 also highlights an important caveat. High average prevention scores can mask weaknesses at specific stages of the attack chain. While many attacks are blocked early, adversaries that bypass initial controls often encounter limited resistance once inside the environment. In healthcare settings, where segmentation is difficult and uptime requirements are strict, this imbalance can allow attackers to move laterally toward high-value systems.
Detection remains one of the most persistent challenges for healthcare organizations. Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals recorded a log score of 54%, placing the sector in the middle of the pack for telemetry coverage. This indicates that a significant portion of attacker behavior is still not being logged, often due to legacy systems, medical devices, and fragmented infrastructure that complicate visibility.
More concerning is the alert score of just 13%, meaning that fewer than one in seven simulated attacks generated a meaningful alert. This gap between visibility and response mirrors trends seen across other industries and highlights a systemic problem in detection engineering.
In healthcare environments, this gap carries added risk. Threat activity that is logged but not escalated can persist undetected, enabling credential abuse, data exfiltration, and ransomware staging. When alerts fail to fire, security teams are left blind to attacks that may already be unfolding across clinical and administrative systems.
One of the most critical trends affecting healthcare is the rise of credential-centric attack success. Across industries, the Blue Report 2025 found that password cracking succeeded in 46% of tested environments, nearly doubling the previous year’s rate. Even more striking, attacks using valid accounts succeeded in 98% of simulations, making credential abuse the least prevented technique overall.
These findings have particular relevance for healthcare organizations. Shared accounts, service credentials, and inconsistent identity controls remain common due to operational constraints and legacy application dependencies. Once attackers obtain valid credentials, they can blend into normal activity, access electronic health record systems, and move laterally without triggering alerts.
Ransomware continues to pose a severe threat to healthcare, but the nature of that risk is changing. The Blue Report 2025 shows that data exfiltration prevention dropped to just 3%, making it the least prevented attack vector for the third year in a row. This trend is especially dangerous for healthcare organizations, which hold vast volumes of regulated patient data and remain frequent targets of double-extortion campaigns.
While encryption events may trigger response processes, silent data theft often does not. Attackers increasingly focus on stealing data first, knowing that healthcare organizations face intense pressure to avoid public disclosures, regulatory penalties, and patient trust erosion.
The Blue Report 2025 reinforces a central lesson for healthcare organizations: more tools do not automatically reduce risk. What matters is whether controls work as intended under real attack conditions. Healthcare organizations should prioritize the following actions.
Move beyond checklist-driven security programs. Healthcare teams must validate which exposures are actually exploitable by simulating real adversary behavior across identity, endpoint, network, and clinical systems.
Logging alone does not protect patients or systems. Detection pipelines should be continuously tested to ensure that real attacks generate timely, actionable alerts without overwhelming clinical operations.
Credential abuse remains one of the most effective attack paths. Healthcare organizations must validate password policies, service accounts, MFA resilience, and credential misuse scenarios regularly.
Outbound monitoring, behavioral detection, and data loss prevention validation are essential as attackers shift toward encryptionless extortion and silent data theft.
Healthcare enters 2026 with stronger prevention foundations than many other industries, and the progress is real. But the Blue Report 2025 makes one thing clear. Confidence in security controls does not hold up unless those controls are continuously validated.
Healthcare organizations that perform best are the ones that keep testing assumptions, regularly prove their defenses still work, and focus relentlessly on the attack paths that put patient safety, data, and operations at risk.
To explore the full findings and understand how healthcare organizations can close critical detection and alerting gaps, download the Picus Blue Report 2025 or request a demo.