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Introduction: A New School Year, an Old Cybersecurity Problem
The return of a new academic year is usually associated with fresh notebooks, crowded campuses, new students and renewed research ambitions. But behind the scenes, another group is preparing for the new term: cybercriminals.
According to new research from Check Point Research, education has become the most heavily targeted industry for cyberattacks worldwide. Between January and July 2026, schools, universities, colleges and research institutions experienced an average of 4,696 cyberattacks per organization every week.
That figure represents an 8% increase compared with the same period in 2025 and is more than twice the cross-industry average of approximately 2,150 weekly attacks.
The timing is hardly accidental.
As students return, educational institutions rapidly increase their use of email, cloud storage, online learning platforms, identity systems, payment portals and collaboration tools. Thousands of new accounts may be created, passwords reset, documents exchanged and financial transactions processed within a short period.
For attackers, that creates something extremely valuable: chaos, urgency and an enormous population of potential victims.
Education Has Become a Prime Cyberattack Target
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With an average of 4,696 attacks per organization every week, the education sector experienced dramatically more activity than most other industries.
Government organizations, the second-most-targeted sector, experienced attack levels roughly 70% lower than education during the same period.
The numbers reveal a fundamental shift in how attackers view educational institutions.
Schools and universities are no longer simply organizations containing student records. They are complex digital ecosystems containing financial information, identity data, intellectual property, research material, employee records, authentication credentials and connections to hundreds or thousands of external users.
July Delivered Another Warning
The situation became even more intense in July.
Check Point recorded an average of 4,848 weekly attacks against education organizations, representing a 14% increase compared with July 2025.
That increase occurred immediately before the academic calendar enters one of its busiest periods.
The beginning of a school year creates a predictable surge in digital activity. Students log into newly created accounts, teachers access course systems, parents interact with payment portals and administrators process enormous volumes of personal information.
Predictability is exactly what attackers need.
Why Cybercriminals Love the Academic Calendar
Cyberattacks against schools are not necessarily random.
The academic calendar gives criminals a roadmap.
Attackers can predict when universities will send acceptance messages, when students will receive financial aid information, when tuition payments become due, when accounts are created and when students begin searching for discounts, housing, scholarships and educational resources.
A phishing email that would look suspicious in February can suddenly appear completely legitimate in August.
A message claiming that a student must “verify their Microsoft 365 account before classes begin” sounds believable when thousands of students are actually preparing to return to school.
That psychological advantage makes seasonal attacks particularly effective.
APAC Remains the Most Attacked Region
The regional numbers provide another important perspective.
Organizations in the Asia-Pacific region experienced the highest overall attack volume, averaging 7,452 attacks per organization each week between January and July 2026.
But volume is not the only concerning metric.
Europe experienced an 18% year-over-year increase, reaching approximately 4,759 weekly attacks per organization.
Latin America recorded an even sharper increase of 42%, reaching around 4,299 weekly attacks.
These increases demonstrate that the education-sector threat is not confined to one geographic region.
Europe’s Expanding Digital Attack Surface
Europe’s educational institutions have increasingly embraced cloud services, digital classrooms, online collaboration and remote-access infrastructure.
Those technologies provide enormous benefits.
They also create additional entry points.
A university may rely on Microsoft 365 for email, cloud storage and identity management while simultaneously operating student portals, research platforms, learning management systems, payment systems, VPNs and third-party applications.
Every connection introduces another potential security dependency.
The problem becomes even more complicated when thousands of students and employees access those systems from unmanaged personal devices.
Latin
The 42% increase recorded in Latin America is particularly striking.
Rapid digital transformation can sometimes create security gaps when new technologies are deployed faster than security policies, monitoring capabilities and employee awareness can evolve.
Educational institutions expanding their cloud footprint therefore need to consider security architecture at the same time as digital transformation.
Adding another online service without properly controlling authentication, permissions and monitoring can unintentionally expand the attack surface.
The Back-to-School Domain Machine
One of the most revealing findings involves newly registered domains.
Check Point Research monitored domains containing education-related terms such as “school,” “university,” “college” and “student.”
In July 2026 alone, researchers identified approximately 18,954 newly registered education-themed domains.
That represented a 5% month-over-month increase and a 3% year-over-year increase.
Not every newly registered domain is malicious, of course.
But the growth creates an enormous environment in which legitimate educational websites can be impersonated.
The Malicious Domain Ratio Is Getting Worse
The more worrying statistic concerns the proportion of suspicious domains.
According to Check Point ThreatCloud data, approximately one in every 305 newly registered education-related domains was flagged as malicious in June.
By July, the ratio had deteriorated to approximately one in every 226.
That change suggests that attackers are becoming increasingly active in registering infrastructure designed around educational themes.
The objective is simple: create domains that look legitimate enough to survive a quick glance.
Familiar Names Make Dangerous Phishing Links
Examples identified by researchers included domains such as:
education-gov[.]com
students-portal[.]com
checkmyschool[.]org
The danger is not necessarily the technical sophistication of these websites.
It is the similarity to something users already expect to see.
A busy student may read “Students Portal” and click immediately.
A parent looking for information about school registration may not carefully inspect every character in a domain.
An employee rushing between meetings may enter a corporate password before noticing that the website is fraudulent.
Automated Registration Campaigns Reveal Industrialization
Researchers also discovered coordinated registration activity.
One campaign included ten student-loan-themed domains following a studentloansYYYY.com pattern covering years from 2026 through 2035.
Another network involved 48 bootcamp-related student domains.
Such patterns suggest automation rather than isolated criminal experimentation.
Attackers can register large numbers of domains, test which ones receive traffic and abandon unsuccessful infrastructure while retaining domains that generate victims.
This turns phishing infrastructure into something closer to an industrial operation.
Students Are Valuable Targets
Students may appear to be low-value targets compared with corporate executives.
That assumption is misleading.
A student’s account can contain passwords, financial information, identity documents, payment details and access to institutional systems.
Students may also reuse passwords across personal and academic services.
Attackers understand this.
A compromised student account can therefore become a stepping stone into a much larger network.
The Fake Student Reward Trap
Researchers identified a campaign using studentdiscount[.]online to imitate a major U.S. retail chain’s student rewards promotion.
The lure promised a fake $750 reward.
Instead of delivering a legitimate promotion, victims were redirected toward fraudulent offers and gambling-related content.
This demonstrates an important principle of modern phishing: criminals do not always need to impersonate the university itself.
They can impersonate anything students expect to encounter during the back-to-school period.
Discounts, scholarships, financial aid, textbook offers, free software and student rewards are all powerful lures.
Malicious PDFs Are Becoming Digital Trojan Horses
Another campaign used malicious PDF documents that impersonated specific schools.
The documents directed victims through multiple compromised websites before eventually presenting counterfeit Microsoft 365 or OneDrive login pages.
This technique combines several layers of deception.
The PDF establishes credibility.
The compromised websites create additional distance from the final phishing destination.
The fake Microsoft login page then attempts to capture the victim’s credentials.
By the time the victim realizes something is wrong, their password may already belong to the attacker.
Compromised School Websites Add Another Layer of Trust
Researchers also discovered a malicious URL hosted on a compromised school website in Bangladesh.
Multiple threat-intelligence sources identified the page as an information-stealing and malware-distribution location.
The website had previously displayed a fake Spotify-branded CAPTCHA.
Fake CAPTCHA pages have become an increasingly useful social-engineering mechanism because users have learned to trust CAPTCHA challenges as a normal part of browsing.
Instead of proving that a visitor is human, the fake CAPTCHA becomes part of the malware delivery chain.
Trust Is the Real Weapon
The most important lesson from these campaigns is that attackers are exploiting trust more than technology.
The malicious infrastructure does not necessarily need to be technically brilliant.
It only needs to appear familiar.
A university logo.
A Microsoft login screen.
A student discount.
A financial-aid message.
A PDF from a supposed professor.
A CAPTCHA.
These familiar elements lower the
The Education Ecosystem Is Larger Than the School
A successful attack against a university rarely affects only the university.
Educational organizations are connected to students, parents, government agencies, research institutions, payment providers, technology companies, scholarship organizations, contractors and suppliers.
That means one compromised account can potentially become an entry point into another organization.
The education sector should therefore be viewed as an interconnected ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated schools.
Research Data Makes Universities Particularly Attractive
Universities are also unusual targets because they frequently possess valuable intellectual property.
Research laboratories can hold sensitive scientific discoveries, unpublished studies, proprietary datasets and information connected to government or commercial partnerships.
An attacker interested in espionage may therefore have little interest in tuition records but enormous interest in a university research environment.
The same institution can simultaneously be targeted for ransomware, credential theft, financial fraud and espionage.
Ransomware Remains a Serious Threat
Although the Check Point findings focus heavily on attack volume and phishing infrastructure, the implications extend beyond credential theft.
Educational institutions are attractive ransomware targets because downtime can have immediate operational consequences.
If students cannot access learning systems, researchers cannot access data or administrators cannot process payments, pressure to restore operations increases rapidly.
That pressure can become an advantage for extortion groups.
MFA Is No Longer Optional
One of the strongest defenses available to educational institutions is multi-factor authentication.
Passwords alone are increasingly unreliable because credentials can be stolen through phishing, malware, credential stuffing and data breaches.
MFA introduces another layer of protection.
However, organizations should avoid assuming that every MFA implementation provides equal protection.
Where possible, phishing-resistant authentication methods such as passkeys or hardware-backed security keys provide stronger protection against modern credential theft than simple one-time codes.
Microsoft 365 Deserves Special Attention
Because educational institutions frequently rely on Microsoft 365 and related cloud services, identity security should be treated as a high-priority control.
Administrators should review:
MFA enforcement
Conditional Access policies
Risk-based sign-in controls
Legacy authentication
Privileged accounts
Guest accounts
Application permissions
OAuth consent
Suspicious mailbox forwarding rules
Unusual login locations
Impossible-travel events
A stolen password should not automatically equal unrestricted access.
Deep Analysis: How Security Teams Can Investigate Suspicious Activity
Security teams can use basic operating-system and network commands to investigate suspicious domains, connections and processes.
For example, administrators can inspect DNS resolution from a controlled investigation environment:
nslookup suspicious-domain.example
Or:
dig suspicious-domain.example
These commands can help analysts determine which infrastructure a domain resolves to and whether the result is consistent with the organization’s expectations.
Checking Network Connections
On Linux systems, defenders can inspect active network connections with:
ss -tupn
On Windows, administrators can use:
Get-NetTCPConnection | Sort-Object State
These commands should be used as part of a broader investigation rather than treated as proof of malicious activity by themselves.
Reviewing DNS and Web Indicators
Security teams can also inspect domain registration and DNS information through approved threat-intelligence platforms.
For example:
dig +short suspicious-domain.example dig suspicious-domain.example MX dig suspicious-domain.example TXT
Unexpected mail records, rapidly changing infrastructure or unusual DNS configurations may justify additional investigation.
Searching Windows Event Logs
On Windows environments, PowerShell can help administrators search relevant event logs:
Get-WinEvent -LogName Security -MaxEvents 100
Organizations should also centralize authentication and endpoint telemetry in a SIEM platform so that suspicious activity can be correlated across multiple systems.
Investigating Processes
Administrators can inspect running processes with:
Get-Process | Sort-Object CPU -Descending
Linux defenders can use:
ps aux --sort=-%cpu | head
Again, a suspicious process is not automatically malicious. Analysts should examine its executable path, parent process, network activity, signatures and execution history.
URL Inspection Should Happen Before Credential Entry
Students and staff should develop the habit of checking the actual domain before entering credentials.
The presence of a familiar logo means almost nothing.
The
A legitimate Microsoft login page and a fake Microsoft login page can look almost identical.
The domain is one of the strongest immediate indicators available to the user.
Security Awareness Needs to Become Practical
Generic security training is often forgotten.
A more effective approach is scenario-based education.
Instead of simply telling students to “beware of phishing,” institutions can show examples involving:
Fake scholarship notifications
Student discount scams
Password expiration messages
Microsoft 365 login requests
Fake tuition refunds
Malicious PDF assignments
Fake OneDrive documents
Cryptocurrency job offers
Internship invitations
Fraudulent student-loan websites
The closer the training resembles real attacks, the more useful it becomes.
Back-to-School Preparation Should Start Before Students Return
Waiting until the first phishing wave arrives is too late.
Institutions should use the weeks before the academic year to review identity systems, patch vulnerable infrastructure, test incident-response procedures and verify backup integrity.
Security teams should also monitor newly registered education-related domains during this period.
The attackers are already preparing.
Defenders should be doing the same.
What Undercode Say:
The Numbers Tell a Bigger Story
Education is no longer a peripheral cybersecurity concern.
It has become one of the largest and most predictable digital attack surfaces in the world.
Predictability Helps Attackers
Academic calendars provide criminals with predictable windows of opportunity.
Attackers can plan campaigns weeks or months before students return.
Human Behavior Is the Weakest Link
Many attacks depend on hurried decisions rather than sophisticated exploitation.
A rushed student can defeat expensive security controls with one credential submission.
Seasonal Phishing Is Extremely Effective
Back-to-school campaigns exploit events people already expect.
That makes malicious messages harder to distinguish from legitimate communications.
Domain Registration Is an Early Warning Signal
The explosion of education-themed domains provides defenders with useful intelligence.
Monitoring newly registered domains can reveal campaigns before they reach large numbers of victims.
Automation Changes the Economics
Registering dozens or hundreds of domains is inexpensive.
Attackers can therefore experiment at scale.
One Successful Domain Can Be Enough
Criminals do not need every phishing domain to succeed.
A small percentage of successful campaigns can still generate significant returns.
Students Are Not Low-Value Victims
Student accounts can contain valuable personal and financial information.
They may also provide access to broader institutional resources.
Staff Accounts Are Even More Valuable
Faculty and administrative accounts often have broader privileges.
Compromising one employee can therefore have consequences far beyond a single mailbox.
Cloud Adoption Has Changed the Threat Model
Moving educational infrastructure to the cloud provides flexibility.
It also means identity becomes one of the most important security boundaries.
Identity Is the New Perimeter
The old model focused heavily on protecting a physical network.
Modern education increasingly requires protecting identities, sessions, devices and applications.
MFA Must Be Standard
There is little justification for leaving critical academic systems protected only by passwords.
Phishing-Resistant MFA Is Better
Where practical, passkeys and hardware-backed authentication should be prioritized.
Legacy Authentication Should Disappear
Old authentication methods can bypass modern identity protections.
Removing them reduces unnecessary exposure.
Third-Party Applications Matter
Educational institutions often connect numerous external applications to cloud accounts.
Every integration should be reviewed.
OAuth Permissions Can Become Dangerous
A user may accidentally grant a malicious application access to legitimate data.
Organizations need visibility into application consent.
Compromised Websites Are Particularly Dangerous
A legitimate school website can become an unexpected malware delivery mechanism.
That makes website security part of the
Trust Can Be Weaponized
Attackers increasingly borrow credibility from trusted brands.
The victim does not need to trust the attacker.
They only need to trust the logo.
Fake CAPTCHAs Demonstrate the Evolution of Social Engineering
Security controls themselves can be copied and weaponized.
Users should therefore question unexpected verification pages.
PDFs Should Not Be Automatically Trusted
A document can contain links that lead to credential-harvesting infrastructure.
File type alone provides no guarantee of safety.
Email Filtering Needs Context
Blocking known malicious domains is useful.
Detecting suspicious behavior and unusual communication patterns is even more valuable.
Security Teams Need Threat Intelligence
Indicators from domain registration, DNS, endpoint and identity telemetry can be combined.
The more signals defenders correlate, the earlier they can detect campaigns.
Universities Need Better Segmentation
Student systems should not automatically have access to sensitive research environments.
Administrative privileges should be tightly controlled.
Research Networks Need Special Protection
Universities frequently handle intellectual property that may be attractive to espionage groups.
Research environments should receive security controls appropriate to their value.
Backups Need Testing
A backup that has never been restored successfully should not be considered a reliable recovery mechanism.
Incident Response Should Be Practiced
During an actual breach, teams should not be deciding who is responsible for containment.
Roles should already be established.
Students Should Be Included in Security Strategy
Students are not merely users.
They are a massive part of the
Parents Also Need Awareness
Parents may receive payment, enrollment and scholarship communications.
They can become targets through the same seasonal campaigns.
Vendors Are Part of the Attack Surface
Third-party suppliers can provide attackers with another route into educational organizations.
Vendor access must therefore be monitored and limited.
Security Budgets Should Follow Risk
The highest-volume targets cannot treat cybersecurity as an optional technology expense.
Education needs sustained investment.
The Academic Calendar Should Drive Defensive Planning
Security teams already know when the largest spikes in activity will occur.
That knowledge should be used proactively.
Threat Hunting Should Increase Before Term Starts
Organizations should search for suspicious authentication, mailbox rules, endpoint activity and domains before traffic reaches its peak.
The Best Defense Is Layered
No single security technology will stop every phishing campaign.
Identity controls, endpoint protection, DNS filtering, email security, training and monitoring must work together.
Attack Volume Is Only One Metric
The number of attacks does not automatically indicate how many breaches occurred.
But the sustained volume demonstrates how aggressively the sector is being probed.
Education Has Become Critical Infrastructure for Digital Trust
Schools and universities hold information that affects millions of people.
Protecting them is increasingly a matter of protecting society’s broader digital ecosystem.
The Real Warning Is the Timing
The increase before the new academic year is not simply a statistical anomaly.
It reflects attackers adapting their operations to predictable human behavior.
Defenders Can Use the Same Predictability
If criminals can anticipate the school calendar, defenders can anticipate criminal activity.
That creates an opportunity for proactive defense.
Back-to-School Security Should Be a Campaign
Security preparation should not be a single checklist item.
It should become a coordinated defensive operation involving IT, administrators, faculty, students and vendors.
The Biggest Lesson
The education sector is being attacked because it combines scale, valuable information, trusted brands, complex infrastructure and millions of users.
That combination makes it extraordinarily attractive.
The Final Warning
When the classrooms fill again, digital traffic will rise with them.
And somewhere in that traffic will be attackers waiting for one person to click.
✅ Education Is the Most Targeted Sector
The supplied research states that education ranked first among 23 industries monitored by Check Point during January–July 2026.
The reported average was 4,696 weekly attacks per organization, significantly above the cross-industry average.
✅ Attack Activity Increased Before the New Academic Year
The article reports 4,848 weekly attacks against education organizations in July 2026.
That represents a reported 14% year-over-year increase and supports the broader seasonal-threat narrative.
✅ APAC Recorded the Highest Attack Volume
The research states that APAC organizations experienced an average of 7,452 attacks per week during the January–July period.
This is a volume measurement and should not be confused with the highest growth rate.
✅ Latin America Had the Sharpest Reported Growth
The article reports a 42% year-over-year increase for Latin America.
That makes the region’s growth substantially higher than Europe’s reported 18% increase.
✅ Malicious Education-Themed Domains Increased
Check
That indicates a deterioration in the proportion of newly registered domains being flagged as malicious.
⚠️ Attack Counts Do Not Equal Successful Breaches
A weekly attack figure represents observed attack activity rather than confirmed successful compromises.
High attack volume should therefore be interpreted as evidence of targeting pressure, not proof that every organization was breached.
⚠️ Domain Registration Alone Does Not Prove Malicious Intent
Many newly registered education-related domains may be legitimate.
The security concern comes from the subset identified as malicious or suspicious through threat-intelligence systems.
Prediction
(+1) Education Will Become More Proactive About Seasonal Cybersecurity
The data strongly suggests that educational institutions will increasingly treat the weeks before a new academic year as a dedicated cybersecurity preparation period.
Security teams are likely to increase phishing simulations, identity monitoring, domain intelligence, endpoint detection and MFA enforcement before students return.
(+1) Passkeys and Phishing-Resistant Authentication Will Expand
As credential phishing continues to evolve, educational institutions are likely to move beyond passwords and basic MFA toward passkeys and stronger phishing-resistant authentication.
The long-term shift will be toward making stolen passwords less useful to attackers.
(+1) Domain Monitoring Will Become More Important
Organizations will increasingly monitor newly registered domains containing institutional names, school terminology and common student-related keywords.
This can provide defenders with an early warning system before phishing campaigns become widespread.
(-1) Attackers Will Continue Exploiting Student Urgency
The fundamental social-engineering advantage will remain.
Students will still be under pressure to register, pay tuition, access course materials and complete administrative tasks.
Attackers will continue exploiting that urgency because technology alone cannot eliminate human decision-making.
(-1) The Attack Surface Will Continue Expanding
More cloud platforms, mobile devices, AI services, third-party applications and digital learning tools will create additional connections between users and institutional infrastructure.
Without strong identity governance and segmentation, that expansion could make education an even more attractive target.
Final Analysis: The New Back-to-School Reality
Cybersecurity Is Now Part of the Curriculum
The traditional image of back-to-school preparation is changing.
Institutions are no longer preparing only classrooms, schedules and textbooks.
They are preparing digital identities, cloud environments, endpoint fleets and enormous networks of connected users.
Attackers Understand the Calendar
The most concerning aspect of the research may not simply be the 4,696 weekly attacks.
It is the fact that criminals appear capable of aligning infrastructure and campaigns with predictable academic behavior.
That means the education sector cannot afford to treat cybersecurity as an emergency response function.
Preparation Must Begin Before the First Login
By the time students receive their first phishing email of the semester, attackers may already have registered the domain, prepared the fake login page and tested their infrastructure.
Defenders need to move earlier.
The strongest defense may therefore happen before the school year even begins.
Education Has Become a Cybersecurity Battlefield
The lesson from the 2026 data is clear: education is no longer an easy-to-ignore target.
It is a massive, interconnected digital ecosystem containing valuable information, millions of users and predictable seasonal activity.
That combination makes it irresistible to cybercriminals.
The new academic year will bring new opportunities for students, teachers and researchers.
Unfortunately, it will also bring new opportunities for attackers.
The institutions that recognize that reality early—and build security into their back-to-school preparations—will have a much better chance of keeping the next academic year focused on education rather than incident response.
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