The real cure for healthcare cybersecurity: Seeing what’s already there

Healthcare systems have always faced a difficult balance, adopting new technology to improve patient care while keeping every connected system secure. But as hospitals evolve into hyperconnected digital ecosystems, their security maturity hasn’t kept pace.

The result is an industry caught between two realities: one of cutting-edge clinical innovation and another of legacy cybersecurity infrastructure. The gap between them is widening every day, creating blind spots across thousands of connected devices that quietly underpin patient care.

Bridging that gap starts with visibility: truly seeing every asset, connection, and behavior across the healthcare network. Because when visibility is unified, risk can finally be understood, prioritized, and acted on before it impacts patient safety.

A threat that starts inside the network

The healthcare sector has become one of the most targeted industries for cyberattacks. Ransomware incidents alone have surged nearly 94% in a single year, according to the Ponemon Institute, and 20% of those attacks now originate from medical devices.

Yet most hospitals still focus their cybersecurity efforts on protecting electronic health record (EHR) systems and corporate IT environments. While those layers are critical, the real threat increasingly comes from within,  from the connected medical, IoT, and OT devices that were never designed with security in mind.

According to Axonius for Healthcare and the Ponemon Institute, more than 53% of connected medical devices in hospitals have at least one critical vulnerability, and over 70% of infusion pumps carry known risks. Meanwhile, a 2024 Censys analysis identified thousands of exposed imaging and monitoring systems connected directly to the internet through unsecured protocols like DICOM and FTP.

The data paints a clear picture: the next healthcare breach won’t start at the perimeter. It will start inside the network.

What’s holding healthcare cybersecurity back

Despite the escalating risks, healthcare continues to lag behind other industries in cybersecurity readiness. That isn’t due to a lack of awareness, but rather a combination of structural and operational barriers.

• Chronic underinvestment: For decades, cybersecurity has been seen as a cost center rather than a patient safety imperative. Only 11% of hospital IT leaders list cybersecurity as a top investment priority, despite the fact that a single breach can cost upwards of $10 million and directly affect care delivery.

• Compliance over control: Regulations such as HIPAA and HITECH were designed to enforce accountability, but over time, they’ve created a culture of box-checking instead of continuous protection. Hospitals often demonstrate compliance on paper while leaving entire classes of devices unsecured.

• The recovery trap: More than half of healthcare organizations hit by ransomware have paid ransom demands to recover data or prevent its release. When the alternative is losing access to clinical systems or delaying patient care, many feel they have no choice.

• Staffing and ownership gaps: Cybersecurity responsibilities are often fragmented across IT, biomed, and security teams, with no unified process for device oversight. The cybersecurity workforce shortage,  now 26% worse than last year, compounds the challenge, leaving gaps that adversaries can exploit.

These barriers aren’t easily solved with more tools. The answer lies in connecting the systems and people hospitals already have, and giving them a shared view of what’s really happening across the network.

The blind spot: vulnerable medical devices

Most medical devices are built for clinical function, not cyber resilience. Many run on outdated operating systems, lack patch management support, and can’t support endpoint protection tools. Their lifespans can stretch a decade or more, long past their vendor’s support window.

Once connected, they operate silently on the network, communicating with dozens of systems and sometimes even the internet. That’s where attackers find opportunity: weak encryption, default credentials, and misconfigured services all create entry points that can go undetected for months.

The FBI’s 2022 advisory to the healthcare sector warned that unpatched and unmonitored medical devices represent a “clear and immediate threat,” not only to data privacy but to clinical operations themselves.

Cyber resilience starts with visibility

Most hospitals already have the infrastructure they need to understand their risk. What they lack is a unified view of it.

By automating asset discovery across all connected systems, medical, IoT, and OT, hospitals can create a single, real-time inventory of everything on the network. This provides an accurate baseline for evaluating risk, planning maintenance, and prioritizing security resources.

But visibility alone isn’t enough. Context is what turns raw data into insight. Hospitals need to understand which devices are critical to patient care, which are most vulnerable, and which represent the highest potential impact. This context enables security, IT, and biomed teams to focus their limited resources where it matters most.

From there, action becomes possible. With an accurate, contextual inventory, hospitals can enforce segmentation, patch management, and vulnerability remediation. They can integrate device data into existing CMMS platforms, incident response systems, and compliance reporting workflows, building security directly into operational practice rather than layering it on top.

Collaboration is the new control

Modern healthcare security depends on collaboration between biomed, IT, and security teams. A patching delay that looks like a technical oversight to IT could be a regulatory failure to compliance, or a patient safety issue to clinical engineering.

Axonius for Healthcare helps unify these perspectives by providing a shared foundation of truth. Through passive network discovery and protocol-level device fingerprinting, we deliver comprehensive visibility and context across all connected systems. With automated workflows and enforcement capabilities, teams can prioritize, isolate, and remediate issues quickly, without disrupting care delivery.

This approach both reduces risk and improves operational efficiency. Hospitals can align around common KPIs, streamline audits, and reduce redundant spending on overlapping tools.

Turning compliance into everyday protection

Healthcare security shouldn’t end at compliance; it should begin there. Regulatory frameworks like HIPAA and HICP are valuable only when their requirements translate into active, continuous protection.

Automating evidence collection, policy validation, and control verification allows hospitals to move beyond reactive reporting. Instead of scrambling for audit data, HTM and security leaders can show proof of compliance in real time, continuously demonstrating that devices are maintained, vulnerabilities are monitored, and networks are segmented.

The future of cybersecurity in healthcare

The healthcare industry needs a clearer approach to cybersecurity. The systems, people, and processes are already in place. The missing piece is unifying them under one view that connects visibility to action.

Axonius for Healthcare was built to do just that. By combining complete asset intelligence with healthcare-specific risk and compliance context, we give hospitals a way to manage their entire attack surface, from endpoints to infusion pumps,  through a single lens of truth.

Learn more about how Axonius for Healthcare helps hospitals strengthen device security, streamline compliance, and reduce operational risk across every connected environment.