Education was never supposed to be a high-stakes sector from a cybersecurity standpoint. The assumption has long been that schools don’t hold financial assets the way banks do, and that their data isn’t valuable enough to attract a sophisticated attack. That assumption is now badly out of date. Ransomware operators have moved aggressively into the education sector over the past five years, hitting school districts, universities, and online platforms with attacks that have paralyzed systems for weeks at a time.