In the cybersecurity universe, speed is everything. The sooner you detect a breach, the less damage that can potentially occur; however, many cyber incidents in healthcare do not follow this timeline. Most of them will happen and be undetected over a period of time – often days, weeks, or even months before anyone knows it has happened. Unfortunately, this lag time can lead to higher risk for patients and organizations alike.

A good example of this growing concern is the Coastal Carolina Health Care data breach. The actual unauthorized access to this system took place over a set period during March 2025, but the total impact of the intrusion was not confirmed until much later. This gap between when the breach happened and when the breach was confirmed is becoming a common occurrence within cyberattacks against the healthcare sector.

One of the reasons why healthcare systems are so susceptible to breaches is because of the number of pieces that make up the overall system. Hospitals and other providers utilize numerous systems to perform essential functions such as patient records, billing, scheduling, insurance processing, and clinical operations. Each of those systems has sensitive data associated with it and is therefore more difficult to monitor from a real-time perspective.

When a suspicious event occurs, and the attacker has taken measures to ensure their actions do not cause any system disruption (use more stealth means), the chances that an alert will be triggered are not as high as they would otherwise. This allows the attacker the opportunity to access and obtain information without raising suspicions.

This is the reason why it is so dangerous when a breach goes undetected for too long. An attacker who breaks into a system may have collected a large amount of sensitive information before the system detects that a breach has occurred. By the time that a health system realizes it has been breached, the attacker may have already moved the sensitive information to a different location or they may have stopped using it, and they may still have the ability to use it later.

The type of information that is at risk in a health care data breach increases the risk. The information in a health care data breach is typically more specific to an individual and is permanent in nature when compared to other forms of personal information. Examples of health care information that may be involved in a health care data breach include: social security number, driver's license number, medical history, health insurance number and any forms of treatment.

The amount of time it takes to fully investigate and confirm the occurrence of a breach presents a significant challenge to the health care organization that is performing that task. They have to conduct a full forensic analysis of the systems they believe have been breached, they have to determine which individuals have been negatively affected by the breach and they have to make a complete determination regarding the information that has been compromised. This can take months and will often require the assistance of a third-party cybersecurity company to assist the health care organization with the investigation.

While conducting this thorough investigation is necessary, the result is that at the end of this lengthy investigation, the affected individuals and organizations may not be notified for a long time and therefore have no idea that they may be at risk of having had their personal identifying information exposed.