As the buzz around back-to-school season subsides and teachers and students fall into the rhythm of a new academic year, it’s time for K-12 administrators and district leaders to turn their attention to cybersecurity strategy.
Throughout 2025, we saw an onslaught of cyberattacks against K-12 school networks. Schools and universities were the third-most victimized industry by cybercriminals in 2024, while the 2025 State of K-12 Cybersecurity report found that 82 percent of 5,000 schools surveyed had experienced some type of cyber incident between July 2023 and December 2024.
Thanks to the wealth of sensitive data at play coupled with budgets that pale in comparison to those in enterprise organizations, schools are a prime target. This means schools are facing an uphill battle against cyberattacks that get more sophisticated each year.
According to the 2024 Sophos State of Ransomware in Education, 26 percent of ransomware attacks started with a phishing email, with the median recovery cost skyrocketing to $3 million USD.
Yet phishing emails used to be a fairly benign threat that could be managed through detection tools and staff training. The spike in success stemming from phishing emails shows us that this approach no longer works.
Tight budgets and the rush of back-to-school preparations mean that training on cybersecurity principles and best practices might not take place at all. A recent report from the FDD noted that some teachers “received no training to change shared default passwords on their devices and management systems.”
Yet even the most conscientious user who follows cybersecurity training to a ‘T’ would find it hard to spot an email with malicious intent thanks to the rise of contextual AI. Bad actors use sophisticated, socially engineered emails to impersonate trusted sources like administrators, vendors, and even students and parents in order to steal credentials, deploy ransomware, or trick staff into wiring funds.
This underscores why a Zero Trust Architecture should be a non-negotiable for K-12 school districts. This is an approach to building a cybersecurity strategy based on the principle foundation of "never trust, always verify."
Mitigating the growing threat of cyberattacks isn’t just about implementing a zero-trust architecture in K-12 schools in 2025. It’s about how schools can keep those defenses continuously updated and effective.
Here are the three key stages K-12 schools need to maintain an effective, zero-trust architecture in 2025 on a budget.
The importance of KPIs and benchmarks
A zero-trust architecture isn’t a product or service but an approach to cybersecurity that assumes that all network traffic has the potential to be hostile, no matter the source or location.
As a result, user verification is a core part of the strategy. Multi-layered authentication should be implemented to verify every access request and data should be encrypted and controlled to limit the severity of any future breaches.
However, schools may struggle to follow these stringent guidelines without impeding on the daily tasks of teachers and administrators who need to access student files, print records or connect new devices to deliver a lesson.
This is why KPIs and benchmarks are an effective way to maintain a zero-trust architecture with a limited IT team. For instance, straightforward benchmarks include the use of multifactor authentication tokens, percentage of completed security updates, presence of compliance requirements and scalability to support remote and hybrid teaching environments. They should be outcome-centric, tied to risk mitigation or business enablement for schools, rather than abstract security metrics.
These should also be comparative so that school boards can measure how effective the approach is. Finally, each target KPI should have the ability to be tracked automatically to ensure this doesn’t add additional burden to the task load of school IT teams.
Leverage technology to streamline patch updates
Keeping track of all updates across software applications and devices in the entire infrastructure at the earliest possible opportunity is one of the most effective ways to maintain a secure perimeter with a zero-trust architecture.
However, limited budgets, outdated infrastructure and staffing shortages are often par for the course. Security patch updates are just one of the tasks that get deprioritized when IT resources are being pulled in multiple directions.
The task of updating devices and services with the latest security patches isn’t complicated in and of itself, but the sheer scale of patch maintenance in a typical school means that a manual approach is unsustainable.
Joe Kuehl, District Technology Manager at Millard Public Schools, explains that they “have upward of 25,000 to 30,000 endpoints, and we’ve got essentially three people that run patch management.”
In addition, new updates come through on a weekly or even daily basis, meaning security patches become an extremely time-consuming task for the limited resources of school IT teams.
When maintenance slides, schools are essentially leaving the back door open. It’s only a matter of time until these weak points are exploited.
To streamline the task of security patch updates, schools are advised to adopt an automated, risk-based approach. This includes maintaining an up-to-date inventory, prioritizing critical vulnerabilities and automating deployment through cybersecurity software built for K-12 schools.
Automation also lets you queue these things up to run in off-hours to avoid impeding performance. If a patch is running, it can slow down your software, and you don’t want that during the busy school day.
Regular assessments maintain a robust security posture
The top cybersecurity threats schools faced last year were ransomware attacks, phishing and social engineering, data breaches, denial-of-service attacks, and malvertisement.
However, the nature of the threats and the level of risk associated with each attack methodology are always changing. This means schools should perform regular security assessments on a quarterly and annual basis to ensure defenses remain robust and adaptable.
As outlined above, it’s important to remember that not only are schools prime targets for hackers, but their use of technology makes their attacks much more sophisticated.
Schools must be prepared to fight fire with fire. Regular security checks should look at the most serious threats first, then find specific tech solutions designed to tackle attack methods with the highest associated risk first and foremost. For example, we know that hackers are using contextually aware AI to get past traditional anti-phishing detectors. To combat this, schools could leverage a chain-of-thought (CoT) AI phishing detection tool.
With a clear set of KPIs, automated patch updates and regular security assessments, K-12 schools have a feasible blueprint to maintain their zero-trust architecture to keep the network protected as we head into 2026.
About the author
Charlie Sander is Chairman and CEO of ManagedMethods
