For businesses and health care institutions, the threat of cyberfraud is on the rise, unleashing fierce competition among law firms and consultants seeking to advise them.

Medical records are especially ripe targets because fraudsters can milk the full value of a health-insurance policy.

But, for all the high-tech and legal firepower available, some experts say the best protection may be better training of employees.

As the threat rises, so has the number of lawyers making it a specialty. Most large firms have practice groups devoted to data security, and so do many smaller ones, fueling the competition.

“It has grown exponentially in the past five years, and the landscape has become quite competitive,” said Scott Vernick, a partner at Fox Rothschild who focuses on privacy, data security, and litigation. “When I started doing this 10 years ago, I had trouble convincing people that this was something to pay attention to.”

“Today, any self-respecting firm has a group.”

A series of high-profile data breaches — notably the huge loss of records by Target and the attack by North Korean hackers on Sony, exposing sensitive internal e-mails — have raised awareness. Forty-seven states now have laws requiring that customers be notified when breaches occur, and setting standards to protect data.

It’s easy to see why. California, with the nation’s toughest data-security laws, says about 49 million digital records there have been improperly accessed or disclosed since 2012. The pace seems to be accelerating. Nearly half those data breaches occurred in 2015.

For any entity that stores confidential customer data, the cost of a breach can be enormous. Jordan Rand, a lawyer at Dilworth Paxson in Philadelphia, estimates that companies pay on average $300 for every record compromised. That’s the cost of detection, notification, restoration of records, legal representation and other actions.