The problem with Summer Holidays
When it comes to cyber-attacks, timing is rarely accidental. And yet every summer, schools and universities are caught off guard; systems are breached, data is locked, plans are disrupted, right as staff begin to switch off. It’s a pattern that’s hard to ignore. These aren’t just unfortunate coincidences. They’re calculated moves by attackers who understand when we’re most exposed, when the lights are on but no one’s watching. The summer break has quietly become peak season for targeting education. The evidence is mounting, and the strategy is clear: hit hard when defences are thin, response times are slow, and the attack surface is quietly expanding in the background.
Let’s take a closer look.
July and August: Peak time for UK education breaches
When you look at the data, it’s clear that summer is when attackers like to strike universities and schools. As reported:
- Cyber-attacks on UK education spike by 40% in summer, with July and August flagged as particularly vulnerable (Farrer & Co, 2025).
- NCSC has warned previously about holiday-period attacks, in August–September 2020 and again in 2021, and these issues aren’t going away.
- According to a 2025 UK Gov survey, 91% of universities and 85% of colleges were attacked in the last 12 months , many during quiet periods.
Example incidents
- Back in August 2021, the BBC reported that six schools were hit by a cyberattack that prevented their staff from accessing their computer systems. The Isle of Wight Education Federation saw its IT systems become compromised by the ransomware attack, which encrypted its data.
- University of the West of Scotland suffered a devastating ransomware attack in July 2023, resulting in over 1 million documents leaked and a £18.3m bill.
- TechTarget’s analysis revealed a surge in ransomware just before and up to August 2023, with eight attacks in August alone in the U.S. education sector, reflecting a global trend.
- July 2024: Lancaster Royal Grammar School was a high-profile institution affected by ransomware intrusions aligned with student absence. This was part of a coordinated attack on British schools, also affecting Orion Education.
- In August 2024, over 650,000 email records were exposed following phishing attacks, just before term resumed.
That’s not random, that’s a strategy.
The attacker’s playbook
The logic behind these attacks is simple, and it’s being repeated with precision. The same conditions that make summer a welcome break for staff also make it a golden window for attackers.
Here’s how it plays out:
- Idle infrastructure sits unpatched or unmonitored.
- Reduced staff means alerts go unseen.
- Supply chain weaknesses become easy entry points.
Once the target has been identified, attackers deploy ransomware or exfiltrate data, often just before the new term begins, when the damage is hardest to undo - everyone just wants the problem to go away, so they are more willing to pay the ransom.
The result? Maximum disruption, minimal resistance.
“Out for summer, Out ’til fall, We might not go back at all”
So can we stop this? Not necessarily, and this is where the non-technical aspects of the threat start to kick in. Many universities still allow external DNS lookups or have dormant services exposed externally. Even if you patch for one exploit, the next variation will bypass it.
And if I’m an attacker? I don’t need a zero-day. I just need timing. I can plant content on an internal LDAP server in June, then trigger it in August when the SOC is under-resourced and the term hasn’t started yet.
So, what can we do?
The best defences combine people, process and technology. That means:
- Mapping all digital assets (infrastructure, vendor systems, cloud endpoints) to understand your attack surface, identify shadow assets, legacy services, and vendor access points.
- Use this to identify potential weak spots, which may include unused admin portals, outdated software, or open DNS services.
- Don’t reduce SOC and incident response to skeleton staffing when teaching stops. Even though the majority of security breaches are caused by human error, the ones that need the quickest responses are those perpetrated by attackers.
- Set up alerts for unusual activity in July and August, and don’t be tempted to increase the threshold to reduce the disturbances; if anything, you should be dialling it down instead of up.
- Ensure supply chain visibility: vendors patch promptly, follow principles consistent with your own approach to cyber security.
- Conduct a tabletop exercise focused on summer surge scenarios.
We’re here to help
At Hexiosec, we’re helping organisations prepare for these threat patterns, not just react to them. We conduct the National Picture of Risk for universities and a number of government departments so that you can stay ahead of the threats, and hopefully enjoy your summer holidays undisturbed.
If you want to know more about how you can manage your attack surface, protect your data and become cyber resilient then contact us here.
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