Colleges and universities experienced a surge in ransomware attacks in 2021, and those attacks had significant operational and financial costs, according to a new report. Nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of ransomware attacks on higher ed institutions succeeded. Hackers’ efforts in other sectors were not as fruitful, including in business, health care and financial services, where respectively 68 percent, 61 percent and 57 percent of attacks succeeded. For this reason, cybercriminals may view colleges and universities as soft targets for ransomware attacks, given their above-average success rate in encrypting higher education institutions’ data.
