Schools in the UK are Unprotected Against Cyberthreats

You think the risk of a cyberattack would be small to your school, but this is simply not true. Schools suffer the most from cyberattacks. This blog post will go over the number of attacks that schools face and the types of threats they face.

There is a large number of cyber attacks that schools are afflicted with. According to the Cyber Security Breaches Survey, most schools suffer from an attack every year. Around 44% of primary schools in the UK had a security breach in 2025, which is similar to the average for businesses. But for secondary schools, this number went up to 68%, which is nearly 1.5 times higher than the national average for business. Further education suffers the most, with 85%, and higher education institutions, universities, are even higher at 91%, nearly one hundred per cent. 

The Type of Attacks

There are many types of attacks that can occur to a computer system, and one attack may include multiple types. So this blog post won’t go over all of them. But will go over the two most prolific ones 

The majority of attacks are done through Phishing, around 90%, which is where the systems are attacked by getting a person to reveal sensitive data or create a vulnerability that a malicious actor can use. It relies on people’s ignorance about cybersecurity. There are other types of attacks that the education sector deals with, such as DDOS, around (denial of service), which around 5% of schools suffer from, except in further and higher education, which suffer 36% of the time with this. This attack spams the system with data, causing it to slow down, making it harder for the staff and students to use it.