Identity compromise has emerged as a central pathway for ransomware attacks against educational institutions, with identity-based techniques involved in 85% of incidents recorded in the sector, according to a new report from Sophos.
The finding comes from the cybersecurity company’s State of Ransomware in Education 2026 report, which examines ransomware incidents affecting lower and higher education institutions across 17 countries. The latest figure is above the 79% cross-sector average, highlighting the extent to which attackers are targeting user identities and credentials to gain access to education networks.
Identity-based techniques covered in the report include malicious email, phishing, compromised credentials and brute-force attacks. Among these, malicious email remained the leading technical root cause, accounting for 31% of ransomware attacks in lower education and 29% in higher education.
The overlap between ransomware and identity attacks was also pronounced. Some 77% of higher education institutions and 71% of lower education organizations said their ransomware incident was also their most significant identity attack.
The findings point to a growing security challenge for schools, colleges and universities, where large populations of students, faculty, administrators and external users create extensive digital identities and access points. Education institutions also hold significant quantities of personal and academic information, while many operate with constrained cybersecurity resources.
“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.
He said identity compromise had become an effective route into organizations, while artificial intelligence was increasing the speed, scale and sophistication of attacks. McKerchar argued that institutions that treat identity as a core security control, alongside integrated detection and response capabilities, would be better positioned to contain threats before they develop into major incidents.
Recovery remains a major challenge
The financial and operational consequences of ransomware were also significant. Average recovery costs across the education sector reached $2.26 million, substantially higher than the cross-sector average of $1.7 million.
Recovery times remained lengthy as well. About 26% of education institutions required between one and three months to fully recover from an attack, nearly twice the 14% cross-sector average. Lower education institutions recorded the highest proportion of organizations requiring at least a month to recover, at 31%.
The report also identified skills and capacity as persistent obstacles. More than half, or 53%, of higher education organizations said they lacked the skills or expertise needed to detect and stop attacks in time. The comparable figure across sectors was 35%.
For lower education organizations, human error was the most frequently cited contributing factor, reported by 52% of respondents. Other challenges included insufficient protection at 47%, unknown security gaps at 42% and limited capacity at 41%.
Encryption and backups
The scale of data encryption increased sharply among lower education institutions. The proportion reporting that data had been encrypted during a ransomware attack rose from 29% in 2025 to 61% in 2026.
Across the education sector, 58% of ransomware attacks resulted in encrypted data. Backups remained the principal mechanism for restoring affected information, with 77% of lower education institutions and 69% of higher education organizations using backups to restore encrypted data. Both figures were above the 66% cross-sector average.
Although ransom demands have declined over the past two years, they remained substantial. The median ransom demand faced by education institutions was $775,200, compared with $698,000 across sectors. At the same time, ransom payments increased by $15,000 compared with the previous year’s report.
Pressure extends beyond technology
The impact of ransomware was also felt by the people responsible for managing institutional technology and security.
About 53% of higher education teams reported increased pressure from senior leadership following an attack, compared with 40% across sectors. Staff absences linked to stress or mental health issues were reported by 39% of education organizations, compared with 29% across sectors.
Leadership turnover was also higher. Some 29% of higher education teams and 27% of lower education teams reported leadership replacement following an attack, against a cross-sector average of 21%.
The report is based on an independent survey of 226 IT and cybersecurity leaders at education organizations affected by ransomware during the previous year. The research was conducted between January and March 2026 and represents the sixth year Sophos has tracked ransomware trends in the sector.
For the report, lower education generally refers to institutions serving students up to age 18, while higher education refers to institutions serving students over 18.
The findings suggest that ransomware resilience in education is increasingly tied to the ability to secure identities, strengthen detection capabilities, address human error and maintain reliable recovery systems. As attackers continue to exploit legitimate credentials and increasingly sophisticated social-engineering methods, educational institutions face the challenge of protecting expanding digital ecosystems without allowing security gaps to disrupt the services on which students and staff depend.
