NETWORK SECURITY FOR EDUCATION PROVIDERS
Learning curve Educational establishments are increasingly being targeted by cybercriminals given the wealth of valuable data they have. But, with budgets constrained, security is not always what it could be – which is where resellers and MSPs step in and there are certain things that should be provided to help keep educational establishments as secure as possible.
“When a cyberattack succeeds, the consequences extend far beyond the network. Lessons are disrupted, students lose access to learning resources, assessments are delayed and administrative teams are forced into crisis management.” Erin O’Kane, senior manager, MSP Partner Ecosystems, International at Barracuda, points to Barracuda Research that detected 58.8 million phishing emails targeting a sample of 536 educational institutions over a three-month period earlier this year. “That translates into around 1,200 phishing emails hitting each institution every day,” she notes. “To put that average in context, it’s worth noting that a UK state secondary school has around 1,150 people on its network, rising to around 11,000 for a university. “More significantly, our research shows that the education sector is more likely than others to be hit with serious types of email-borne threat: 38% experienced email-initiated ransomware incidents over a 12-month period, compared with 28% for all sectors, while account takeover affected 27%, versus 20% overall. “For resellers and MSPs, the important point is that education customers may not have complete visibility of the problem. While more than three-quarters of education respondents said they had experienced an email security incident in the previous 12 months, they were also four times more likely than others to admit they couldn’t tell whether they’d experienced an incident. That
The number of cyberattacks in the UK is growing, fuelled by advancements in AI, and one of the most targeted sectors is education. The Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/26 found 73% of secondary schools, 88% of further education colleges and 98% of higher education institutions identified a cyber security breach or attack in the previous 12 months. As Richard Eglon, CMO of Nebula Global Services, notes, this figure is significantly higher than the 43% reported across UK businesses overall. “Yet many institutions still view cybersecurity as an IT issue rather than a business continuity issue,” he adds. “In my view, that’s a mistake. The question shouldn’t be, ‘Will we be targeted?’ but ‘what happens when the classroom goes offline?’
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The financial and operational impact of downtime, recovery efforts and reputational damage can far outweigh the investment required to strengthen security in the first place.
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