Defend the Mission at Machine Speed

While global cyber threats evolve, higher education institutions and research centers face a specialized, hyper-targeted paradox: adversaries are synchronizing sophisticated attacks with the academic lifecycle to commit financial fraud and exfiltrate sensitive research data. Get the frontline intelligence you need to secure your institution’s digital perimeter.

The annual M-Trends report is the industry standard for cyber intelligence, derived from over 500,000 hours of incident response. The 2026 Public Sector Trends: M-Trends and Beyond report translates these global findings into actionable insights for Higher Education, Research, and Academic leaders.

Inside the report, you’ll discover:

• • The Exploited Academic Calendar: How threat actors leverage LLMs to scale hyper-personalized phishing during peak academic windows to redirect financial aid, payroll, and scholarship funds.
  • The Research Data Blind Spot: Why education accounted for 4.6% of global incident response investigations, making it a primary target for state-sponsored intellectual property theft.
  • The SaaS Domino Effect in Academia: How attackers bypass traditional firewalls and MFA entirely by exploiting Non-Human Identities (NHIs) like stolen OAuth refresh tokens to execute mass data exports of sensitive research.
  • IT Help Desk Target: How financially motivated groups like UNC3944 are actively impersonating employees to request password resets and compromise authentication settings.