The healthcare breach numbers are sobering, jolting even, as healthcare and government sectors move to the top of the list of sectors sustaining the most data breached.

This is according to a new report from global digital security giant Gemalto.

In its 2015 First Half Review, Gemalto shows that "healthcare and government overtook retail as the major sectors under siege with the number of compromised data records."

In healthcare, insurance giant Anthem led the pack with its massive cyber attack at the start of February in which nearly 80 million Anthem members had their personal data stolen.

[See also: Lessons from the Anthem hack.]

"Anthem was the target of a very sophisticated external cyber attack," Anthem President and CEO Joseph R. Swedish, said at the time.

Among other notable breaches Gemalto highlights in the analysis period was a breach of 21 million records at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management that occurred last June.

[See also: Risk analysis could have prevented OPM misery.]

According to Gemalto, 888 data breaches occurred in the first half of 2015, compromising 245.9 million records worldwide.

The healthcare sector experienced the most data breaches – 187, which accounted for 21 percent of the total number of breaches across all sectors.

Even so, the number of breaches in healthcare is down compared to recent half-year reports, both in the number of breaches and in the share of breaches across industries, Gemalto notes.

As for the number of data records lost, healthcare took the lead with 84.4 million records lost – 34 percent of the total.

[Learn more: Meet the speakers at the HIMSS and Healthcare IT News Privacy and Security Forum.]

This represents a dramatic shift from the past few years when both healthcare and government had relatively small numbers of records involved in data breaches, according to Gemalto. For example, in the second half of 2014, healthcare accounted for only 5.2 percent of stolen records and government accounted for only 2.8 percent.

The leading type of data breach in the first half of 2015 was identity theft as the cause of 472 data breaches, accounting for more than half (53.2 percent) of first half of 2015 attacks and nearly three-quarters (74.9 percent) of compromised data records. Five of the top 10 breaches in the first half of 2015, including the top three, were identity theft breaches.

"It's apparent that a new approach to data security is needed if organizations are to stay ahead of the attackers and more effectively protect against data breaches in the future," Gemalto researches conclude.

[See also: Security stars to headline Privacy & Security Forum.]

"In today's environment, the core of any security strategy needs to shift from breach prevention to breach acceptance, according to Gemalto. "And, when one approaches security from a breach-acceptance viewpoint, the world becomes a relatively simple place where securing data, not the perimeter, is the top priority."

"There is nothing wrong with network perimeter security technologies as an added layer of protection," the report adds. "The problem is that many enterprises today rely on them as the foundation of their information security strategies, and, unfortunately, there is really no fool-proof way to prevent a breach from occurring. Alarmingly, market trends show that the lion's share of organizations have no plans to change this approach."

Gemalto cites research firm IDC, which recently reported that of the $32.6 billion enterprises spent on security technology in 2014, 62 percent, or $20.2 billion, was invested in network and perimeter security.