Just 11% of UK healthcare breaches account for 65% of data exposed

Mitigating just a fraction of all healthcare data security incidents could protect the data of millions of individuals, according to cybersecurity experts.

Just 11% of healthcare security incidents in the UK put 65% of victims’ data at risk, a new research from cybersecurity firm Huntsman Security has revealed. It also looked into the situation in Australia, where 28% of incidents accounted for 90% of all victims.

The findings are based on a combination of Freedom of Information requests and independent analysis of data from the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC).

Across both countries, issues such as misconfigured systems, excessive access rights, and phishing exposed the data of more than 3 million people, the research showed.

In the UK, 45% of preventable breaches, and 63% of healthcare breaches overall, involved health data, while attackers targeting the healthcare sector were the least likely to steal basic personal identifiers or financial information.

The researchers also found that healthcare breaches were most likely to involve children’s data, accounting for 16% of cases in the UK. Information on vulnerable adults was particularly targeted, appearing in 16 % of breaches, compared to an average of 8%.

Healthcare organizations in the UK also took longer to report a breach, with 95 days compared to 78 on average.

“Healthcare organizations are responsible for some of our most private, sensitive data. Inevitably, this makes them a target for attackers: reducing this risk needs to be a priority,” said Peter Woollacott, chief executive of Huntsman Security.

“We can see that addressing preventable attacks can have a five-to-one impact,” he said, noting that cyber assessment frameworks provided by organizations like the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) or the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as an “excellent” basis for reducing the risk of preventable attacks.

“Controls such as effective and timely patching, multi-factor authentication, user application hardening, and regular backups might seem simple, but can be an often-overlooked element of a successful security strategy,” Woollacott said.

Britain’s publicly funded National Health Service (NHS) came under the spotlight last year after a breach involving its data was claimed by the Russia-linked ransomware cartel Cl0p.

However, despite sustained attacks on healthcare systems around the world last year, the average ransom demand in the sector fell by 80% compared with the previous year, according to Comparitech’s 2025 Healthcare Ransomware report.

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