New report reveals rising recovery costs, longer recovery times, and growing pressure on IT teams as cybercriminals increasingly target identities instead of systems
Educational institutions across the world are facing an intensifying ransomware threat, with identity compromise emerging as the primary gateway for attackers. According to Sophos’ latest State of Ransomware in Education 2026 report, identity-based attack techniques were involved in 85% of ransomware incidents targeting educational institutions, significantly higher than the cross-sector average of 79%.
The findings highlight a major shift in the ransomware landscape, where attackers increasingly rely on stolen credentials, phishing campaigns, malicious emails, and brute-force attacks to infiltrate networks. Rather than focusing solely on exploiting software vulnerabilities, cybercriminals are targeting the identities that provide legitimate access to systems, applications, and sensitive data.
The report, which surveyed 226 IT and cybersecurity leaders from education organizations across 17 countries, paints a concerning picture of the challenges facing both schools and universities as they attempt to defend against increasingly sophisticated attacks.
Identity Has Become the New Battleground
For years, cybersecurity strategies largely focused on protecting networks and endpoints. However, today’s attackers understand that compromising a legitimate user account often provides faster and easier access to critical systems than attempting to bypass technical defenses.
Sophos found that malicious email remains the most common technical root cause of ransomware attacks in both lower and higher education. Approximately 31% of attacks against lower education institutions and 29% of attacks against higher education organizations originated through malicious email campaigns.
These attacks often begin with phishing emails designed to trick staff, faculty members, or administrators into revealing login credentials, approving fraudulent requests, or downloading malicious files. Once credentials are compromised, attackers can move through networks using trusted access, making detection significantly more difficult.
The impact of identity compromise extends beyond initial access. According to the study, 77% of higher education institutions and 71% of lower education organizations reported that their ransomware incident was also the most significant identity-related attack they faced during the year.
These findings reinforce a concerning trend: ransomware and identity attacks are increasingly becoming one and the same.
Why Education Remains a Prime Target
Educational institutions continue to present attractive opportunities for cybercriminals. Schools, colleges, and universities manage extensive volumes of sensitive information, including student records, financial details, research data, healthcare information, and employee records.
At the same time, many institutions operate within tight budgets, making it difficult to maintain large cybersecurity teams or invest in advanced security technologies.
“Education institutions remain attractive targets because they hold vast amounts of personal data while operating under significant resource constraints,” said Ross McKerchar, Chief Information Security Officer at Sophos.
The growing use of artificial intelligence by threat actors is further exacerbating the problem. AI now enables attackers to generate more convincing phishing emails, automate credential theft campaigns, identify weak security controls, and scale attacks more efficiently than ever before.
As a result, educational institutions find themselves defending against increasingly sophisticated adversaries with limited resources.
Skills Shortages and Human Error Continue to Create Risk
The report found that educational organizations face greater operational challenges than many other sectors when it comes to defending against ransomware.
More than 53% of higher education institutions said they lacked the skills or expertise required to detect and stop attacks before they escalated into major incidents. By comparison, only 35% of organizations across all sectors cited similar concerns.
“Today’s attackers don’t need a crowbar when they can steal the keys. Identity compromise has become one of the most effective paths into an organization, and AI is only increasing the speed, scale, and sophistication of these attacks,” said Ross McKerchar, Chief Information Security Officer, Sophos.
Lower education institutions identified a range of contributing factors behind successful attacks, with:
- 52% citing human error
- 47% reporting insufficient protection measures
- 42% pointing to unknown security gaps
- 41% identifying limited organizational capacity
These findings suggest that ransomware is not simply a technology issue. Effective defense increasingly depends on user awareness, staff training, security operations expertise, and organizational preparedness.
Data Encryption Rates Surge Across the Sector
Another alarming trend identified in the report is the significant increase in the rate at which ransomware attacks result in encrypted data.
Among lower education institutions, the proportion of ransomware incidents that resulted in data encryption more than doubled from 29% in 2025 to 61% in 2026.
Across the broader education sector, 58% of ransomware attacks resulted in encrypted information, demonstrating that attackers continue to successfully reach and lock critical systems.
The increase suggests that threat actors are becoming more effective at achieving their primary objective: disrupting operations by denying organizations access to their own information and creating pressure to pay a ransom.
Backup Systems Remain the Most Important Recovery Tool
Despite the rising effectiveness of ransomware attacks, the report highlights the critical role that backup systems continue to play in recovery efforts.
More than 77% of lower education institutions and 69% of higher education organizations successfully restored encrypted data using backups. Both figures exceed the cross-industry average of 66%.
The findings reinforce the value of maintaining secure, regularly tested backup environments. While backups cannot prevent attacks, they significantly reduce reliance on ransom payments and can accelerate the recovery process.
For many educational institutions, backup systems represent the most effective safeguard against catastrophic data loss.
Recovery Costs Reach New Highs
The financial consequences of ransomware continue to escalate across the education sector.
According to Sophos, the average cost of recovering from a ransomware attack reached $2.26 million, substantially higher than the cross-sector average of $1.7 million.
These costs extend far beyond ransom payments and often include:
- Incident response activities
- System restoration efforts
- Business disruption losses
- Legal and compliance expenses
- Technology upgrades
- Additional cybersecurity investments
While median ransom demands have fallen for a second consecutive year, they remain substantial. Educational institutions reported a median ransom demand of $775,200, compared with the cross-sector median of $698,000.
Interestingly, although ransom demands have declined, actual ransom payments increased slightly compared with the previous year, highlighting the difficult decisions organizations face when systems become inaccessible.
Education Organizations Recover More Slowly Than Most Industries
Recovery timelines have also emerged as a major challenge for schools and universities.
More than 26% of educational institutions required between one and three months to fully recover from a ransomware attack. This is nearly double the cross-sector average of 14%.
Lower education institutions experienced the greatest difficulties, with 31% taking a month or longer to return to normal operations, the highest rate observed among all surveyed sectors.
Long recovery periods can significantly affect learning environments by disrupting classes, administrative operations, examinations, enrollment processes, research activities, and student services.
The findings suggest that educational institutions often face greater challenges rebuilding systems and restoring operations than organizations in other industries.
The Human Cost of Ransomware Continues to Rise
Beyond financial and operational impacts, the report highlights the growing toll ransomware attacks are taking on people.
More than 53% of higher education IT and cybersecurity teams reported experiencing increased pressure from senior leadership following a ransomware incident. This compares with 40% across all industries.
The emotional and psychological consequences are equally concerning. Approximately 39% of education organizations reported staff absences related to stress or mental health issues following an attack, compared with 29% across all sectors.
Leadership turnover also increased significantly. The report found that:
- 29% of higher education institutions experienced leadership replacement following an attack.
- 27% of lower education institutions reported leadership changes.
- The cross-sector average stood at 21%.
These statistics demonstrate that ransomware incidents can have lasting organizational consequences that extend well beyond technology systems.
Identity Security Must Become a Core Priority
The Sophos report concludes that educational institutions need to rethink their cybersecurity strategies around identity protection.
As attackers increasingly exploit legitimate user accounts to gain access, traditional perimeter-based defenses are no longer sufficient. Organizations must focus on strengthening authentication controls, improving phishing resistance, adopting identity threat detection, and implementing integrated monitoring and response capabilities.
The research makes one thing clear: ransomware attacks against education are increasingly identity-driven. Institutions that prioritize identity security, continuous monitoring, backup resilience, and rapid response capabilities will be better positioned to defend themselves in an environment where compromised credentials have become the preferred weapon of cybercriminals.
As AI continues to increase the sophistication and scale of cyberattacks, protecting identities may become the single most important security investment educational institutions can make.
