Higher education is under siege, and fragmented security is making it harder to respond

What happened

Nine in ten universities reported experiencing a breach or security incident during the previous 12 months, while the average cost of a data breach (an incident in which data leaves an organisation without permission) in education reached $10.22 million. Confirmed attacks against higher education institutions exposed more than 3.9 million records in 2025, with ransomware (software that locks up files and demands payment) continuing to disrupt teaching, research, financial aid, and administrative operations.

Higher education faces a difficult security equation. Universities hold large volumes of sensitive student, financial, health, and research data while supporting open networks, distributed users, legacy infrastructure, and increasingly complex cloud environments.

Attackers have taken notice, and the pressure on security teams continues to grow. In Q2 2025, universities faced an average of 4,388 cyberattacks per organization per week, up 24% from the same period in 2024.