Education | Report

Education data breaches report: Q4 2024 (April 2025)

Summary

This report provides a comprehensive overview of data leak incidents impacting the UK education sector during the month of April.

The education industry continues to face persistent cybersecurity challenges, with threat actors targeting institutions due to their extensive repositories of personally identifiable information (PII), financial data, and intellectual property. This report will examine individual data breaches, identify the threat actors or groups behind them, analyse their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and, most importantly, provide security recommendations to help mitigate the risk of similar attacks.

Key takeaways:

  • Activity by financially motivated groups is high, particularly targeting higher education institutions with ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) models.
  • Most leaked data included student academic records, staff HR files, and institutional financial documents.
  • Training employees on best practices for password hygiene and promoting the use of multi-factor authentication to enhance security and reduce the risk of compromised credentials.

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