Healthcare has been among the industries most affected by data breaches related to staff mistakes, according to Verizon.
“Breaches take many forms, but in the healthcare sector, one pattern stands out: miscellaneous errors,” the telecom giant stated in its annual data breach investigations report. “The ranking may vary from year to year, but it remains a chronic problem that needs a cure.”
Here are seven more things to know about healthcare data breaches, according to the study that analyzed security incidents between Nov 1, 2024, and Oct 31, 2025:
1. Healthcare had 1,438 data breaches, the fourth-most of any sector.
2. System intrusion (largely ransomware), miscellaneous errors and social engineering represented represented 81% of the breaches.
3. The most common errors were misdelivery (data being sent to the wrong recipient), loss (such as unencrypted user devices and portable media) and misconfiguration (like exposing a data repository to the internet without appropriate controls).
4. Eighty-one percent of the threat actors were external, while 19% were internal.
5. The No. 1 motive by far (99%) was financial, with 2% espionage-related.
6. The most common initial access points for threat actors were vulnerability exploitation (20%), phishing (14%), and credential abuse (11%).
7. Fifty-four percent of the breaches involved a human element, while 32% originated with third parties (the Oracle E-Business Suite vulnerability was a big driver across industries).
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