The education sector is battling a torrent of cyber threats, with new research showing attacks on colleges and universities surging by 67% over the last year.
SonicWall said its threat intelligence team has recorded more than 19.3 million medium and high-severity intrusion attempts so far this year – a significant increase compared to the 11.5 million events recorded across the whole of 2025.
Most activity was concentrated in the educational services category, which accounted for 16.8 million events, or 87% of the sector total.
According to SonicWall, attackers are primarily probing web-facing education infrastructure. Path traversal and directory manipulation attacks accounted for 10.2 million hits across the four leading signatures, the company noted, while web-based attacks accounted for 17.3 million events overall.