Education institutions face frequent phishing and slow recovery; new Barracuda survey finds.
Educational institutions are dealing with phishing emails and struggling to recover once attackers get in, according to a new global survey from cybersecurity firm Barracuda Networks.
Attacks arrive by the thousands
Barracuda’s threat research found that a sample of 536 education institutions received 58.8 million phishing emails over three months—roughly 1,200 per institution every day. As attackers lean more on AI to sharpen their phishing tactics, security teams are finding it harder to catch every malicious message before it lands.
The survey, which covered 2,000 IT and security leaders across the US, Europe and Asia Pacific, included 113 respondents from the education sector. Of these, 77% said their institution had suffered an email security incident in the past year. Only 34% said they had successfully detected and blocked phishing attempts, and education respondents were four times more likely than the global average to say they couldn’t even tell whether an incident had occurred, underscoring how hard it is to spot attacks.
Ransomware and account takeovers hit harder
Education tied for the highest rate of email-driven ransomware globally, at 38% compared with 28% overall, and recorded the highest rate of account takeover, at 27% versus 20% globally.
Recovery lags behind
The sector fell behind the global average at every stage of incident response detection, investigation, containment and recovery, with the widest gaps in investigation and recovery, each trailing by 8 percentage points. Nearly one in five institutions took up to a week to restore normal operations, double the industry average, showing how slowly recovery can stall operations.
As students, staff and researchers reconnect with digital services, education institutions face heightened cyber risk, driven by the valuable data, limited security resources and large, diverse user communities.
-Merium Khalid, Director, AI & Automation, Office of the CTO, Barracuda.
Skills gap compounds the problem
Over a third of respondents cited a lack of incident-response expertise as a challenge, while 33% said responding quickly during live incidents was difficult. Just over half pointed to user behaviour and human error as a leading contributor to incidents.
Notably, 41% of education respondents said they wanted trustworthy AI-assisted detection and investigation tools—the highest demand of any industry surveyed—signalling that institutions see these tools as the clearest path to relief.
