Why Education is a Growing Cyber Target

This briefing outlines a sharp increase in cyberattacks against educational institutions—driven by large volumes of PII, fragmented IT environments, limited cybersecurity resources, and heavy third‑party vendor reliance—highlighting rising ransomware activity and escalating ransom payments, examples of school disruptions, and recommended defenses such as vendor risk management, security ratings, network segmentation, incident response playbooks, and leveraging government/nonprofit resources.