Education Phishing Statistics
Nearly one in eight phishing attacks that reach student inboxes originate from compromised internal accounts.
89% of schools experienced at least one cyber incident in the past year, primarily phishing, unauthorized access, and malware.
92% of school IT leaders expect AI-powered phishing to be the most dangerous threat in the coming year
11% of education institutions reported that AI-generated phishing attempts or misinformation campaigns caused disruption.
20% of education institutions reported that they haven’t experienced AI-generated phishing attempts or misinformation campaigns.
36% of education institutions responded 'Not that I know of' when asked about AI-generated phishing attempts or misinformation campaigns.
30% of education institutions reported that AI-generated phishing attempts or misinformation campaigns were contained quickly.
41% of schools said they have faced phishing, misinformation and other disruptive efforts.
For large organisations, the average Phish Prone Percentage (PPP) after one year of sustained training dropped to 4.9%.
After one year or more of sustained training, the average Phish Prone Percentage (PPP) for small institutions dropped dramatically to 3.9%.
After 90 days of training and simulated phishing tests, the Phish Prone Percentages (PPPs) for the education sector reduced to 19%, 19.4%, and 18% respectively for small, medium, and large organisations.
For medium sized organisations, the average Phish Prone Percentage PPP after one year of sustained training dropped to 5.2%.
KnowBe4's 2024 Phishing by Industry Benchmarking Report found that in the education sector specifically, the baseline PPP (Phish Prone Percentage) for small organisations (1-249 employees) was 33.4%.
HTML attachments make up 82% of malicious email attachments in the education sector
The median time to click on a malicious link after the email is opened is 21 seconds.
It takes only another 28 seconds to enter the data after clicking a malicious link.
For education institutions with 250-999 employees, the baseline Phish Prone Perecentage (PPP) was 31.2%.
For large educational institutions with more than 1,000 employees the baseline Phish Prone Percentage (PPP) was 31.7%.