For the education sector, cybersecurity isn’t just about preserving reputation and minimizing financial damage. It plays a critical role in protecting student wellbeing and ensuring every child and young adult fulfils their learning potential. The challenge that schools, colleges and universities have is that their resources are increasingly no match for an agile and determined adversary.
There’s no easy way to reset this imbalance. But a good start would be to work with external providers to ensure intrusions are rapidly detected and contained, minimizing their impact.
Why do threat actors hold the advantage?
The challenge for education institutions lies partly in the diversity of their adversaries. Financially motivated cybercriminals are the biggest threat. They look for ways to extort schools and colleges through ransomware-related disruption, steal data for identity fraud, and target administrators with business email compromise (BEC). Then there are nation state actors who prowl the networks of universities looking for cutting-edge research and IP to steal for homegrown companies. In 2024, MI5 briefed vice-chancellors from over 20 UK universities about the threat.
There are also less obvious threats. Hacktivists can cause real damage and distract IT security teams, while curious pupils wanting to test their skills often find themselves in hot water. The UK’s privacy regulator revealed that over half of school insider cyber attacks are caused by students.
Cybercriminals and nation state actors have all the tools and know-how they need to launch sophisticated intrusion attempts on the sector. They have the advantage of surprise, and a large attack surface to aim at. And increasingly, they’re using AI for tasks like social engineering, victim reconnaissance, and vulnerability research and exploit development. AI helps to lower the barrier to entry for less skilled cybercriminals, enabling them to scale and automate campaigns with ease. Pre-built phishing and exploit kits offer similar benefits.
Perhaps even more impactful over the past year have been infostealer-as-a-service offerings, which have led to a flood of compromised credentials on the cybercrime underground. This simplifies initial access, enabling intruders to walk through the digital front door without setting off any alarms. They continue to stay hidden using living-off-the-land techniques and targeting identity systems for persistence and lateral movement.
The cybercrime business model amplifies the advantage that threat actors have over network defenders. Initial access brokers (IABs) and ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) models mean that subject matter experts do much of the heavy lifting for more generalist adversaries. Specific RaaS groups like Qilin, Fog and SafePay specialize in attacking schools, colleges and universities.
Why is education on the back foot?
On the other side, many educational institutions are struggling to defend their users, networks and data with limited resources. According to one report, ransomware attacks on the sector in the first half of 2025 jumped 23% annually. Beyond funding, why are they floundering?
Schools and universities often host sprawling IT environments spanning on-premises and cloud systems, remote learning and unmanaged BYOD. Networks tend to be largely unsegmented and, in some cases, remote students from high-risk countries like China and Russia need access during holidays. Students also represent a diverse and challenging user base, with shadow IT and even script kiddie-like attacks a constant risk.
Stretched IT and security teams are continuously fighting fires when they should be thinking strategically about building more secure environments. A lack of SecOps cover at weekends and during long holiday periods leaves institutions exposed more than many organizations.
How managed detection and response can help
Managed detection and response (MDR) is not a silver bullet solution to these problems. But it can help to alleviate some of the most pressing challenges. By outsourcing threat detection and response to an expert third party, schools, colleges and universities benefit from 24/7/365 coverage. That means, whenever an intrusion or suspicious activity is spotted, anywhere in their distributed IT environment, it can be rapidly addressed and contained.
MDR providers will often have not only more highly skilled professionals staffing their security operations center (SOC), but access to more advanced analytics tools and threat intelligence to improve detection rates.
What to look for in an MDR provider
That said, not all MDR is created equal. If you’re looking for a provider for your school, college or university, consider the following:
MDR is not as simple as flicking a switch. For the best results, your provider will need to customize detection rules, exclusions and parameters to match your IT environment and specific threats. Look for one that can balance speedy onboarding with optimized detection performance. MDR must work 24/7/365 to ensure attacks are stopped as early on as possible.
You also need a comprehensive tech stack. At a bare minimum, your MDR provider should be using endpoint or extended detection and response (EDR/XDR), threat intelligence and research, along with rapid remediation capabilities. AI can help MDR by analyzing large data volumes to spot anomalous behavior. And automation is also useful in accelerating response and containment times.
Technology is vital to MDR, but “only” as a tool for experienced SOC analysts. Their contextual understanding is vital to reduce false positives and spot novel threats. Additionally, updates should be gathered from telemetry and curated by expert threat intelligence teams to reveal attack methods and effective countermeasures. For more sophisticated attacks, your MDR provider should use proactive threat hunting techniques.
Many MDR providers also handle remediation and recovery once a threat has been discovered. Choose whichever option best fits your requirements. Also, ensure your MDR service integrates neatly with the rest of your IT operations, such as ticket management systems and internal workflows. Your MDR provider must adhere to any regulatory/industry-specific data privacy, residency or retention requirements and/or insurance policy clauses.
The financial impact of recovering from a security breach can be significant, as can reputational damage that may discourage potential students from enrolling. But disruption to learning is perhaps the most insidious impact of cyber incidents in the education sector. This doesn’t show up on annual financial reports. Yet as the pandemic illustrated, it can have a major impact on social inequality and students’ projected lifetime earnings.
The bottom line: cybersecurity is not merely another IT cost. It’s fundamental to the mission of educational institutions.
