During the four-week period from 1 May 2025 to 31 May 2025, our review of ransomware.live indicates that three significant ransomware incidents impacted institutions in the Education sector. These intrusions were confirmed via secondary public sources, including Mandiant (9 May 2025) and IBM X-Force Exchange (15 May 2025). While these attacks varied in scope and severity, they shared a worrying commonality: the continued targeting of universities and colleges that handle extensive personal data, financial information and critical research. The involvement of well-organised cybercriminal groups reinforces the importance of fortified cyber defences across the Education industry, as attackers continue to exploit ageing systems, insufficient threat monitoring and under-resourced security teams.
The first incident, observed on 4 May 2025, involved a mid-sized UK university that was forced to suspend online services for several days. According to The Hacker News (8 May 2025), the perpetrators leveraged a known vulnerability in a misconfigured VPN gateway (tracked as CVE-2025-1928) to gain initial access. CrowdStrike Falcon OverWatch (12 May 2025) attributes this intrusion to a threat actor group with historical campaigns targeting the public sector. The second incident, discovered on 12 May 2025 at a French educational institution, exhibited the hallmarks of an emerging ransomware strain that relies on follow-on phishing campaigns and lateral movement through poorly segmented networks. Finally, the third breach impacted a research-intensive college in Germany on 19 May 2025, where swift containment reportedly prevented extensive data encryption.
Our deeper investigation into the group behind the second incident links them to tactics commonly associated with Vice Society, a known ransomware collective specialising in double extortion methods and opportunistic phishing. Vice Society frequently exploits unpatched software, relying on stolen credentials to breach networks and elevate privileges. In the French compromise, Vice Society appeared to move laterally using PowerShell scripts to deploy custom binaries, and later exfiltrated sensitive data before launching a full-scale encryption routine. Consequently, the institution’s leadership faced heightened extortion demands in exchange for restoring critical servers. According to Recorded Future (22 May 2025), Vice Society’s practice of publishing stolen data on dark web forums places additional pressure on victims to comply, lest the organisation faces reputational damage, regulatory fines or both.
Education institutions should heed several practical lessons from these events. Foremost, timely patch management and rapid deployment of security updates are paramount to closing exploitable vulnerabilities such as CVE-2025-1928. Robust email filtering and ongoing phishing awareness campaigns similarly help to reduce the likelihood of credential compromise. Network segmentation and privileged access controls further mitigate the effects of unauthorised lateral movement within the campus environment. Continuous monitoring, ideally complemented by advanced endpoint detection solutions, can identify early indicators of compromise—particularly when known malicious tools or behaviours are flagged by solutions such as Mandiant or IBM X-Force Exchange. Collaboration with trusted third-party threat intelligence providers and reliance on frameworks endorsed by agencies such as the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) also strengthen defences by aligning local security practices with global best-in-class standards and informed threat feeds.
As the Education sector grapples with increasingly sophisticated adversaries, these incidents serve as a catalyst for improving institutional resilience. Whether through the adoption of zero-trust network architectures, the establishment of rigorous incident response playbooks, or deeper investments in staff training, universities and colleges with robust cyber governance will be better equipped to detect and disrupt nefarious activities at an early stage. For additional insights and to stay informed of emerging threats, please visit Cyber Defence for curated threat intelligence and sector-specific advisories.
