Universities and infostealers: 99.3% of 295 organisations have staff logins in stealer logs

Infostealer statistics · Universities · October 2026

99.3% of the 295 universities in the Ransomnews panel have employee credentials in stealer logs in the October 2026 snapshot, against 89.4% across all 36 countries. The median organisation in the sector has 127 such credentials in circulation (31 panel-wide), 11,989 were captured in the 30 days before the snapshot, and 93.2% of organisations gained at least one. Universities rank 1st of 21 sectors with ten or more organisations by the share of organisations exposed and 2nd by credentials per organisation.

By the Ransomnews Research Team. Part of the Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset; aggregates only, refreshed monthly.

How universities compare with the rest of the panel

Universities are more exposed than the panel as a whole: 99.3% of them have at least one employee credential captured by infostealer malware, against 89.4% across the panel, and the median organisation carries 127 credentials against 31. The distribution is long-tailed: 2 organisations have no employee credentials in the index, 171 have a hundred or more and 19 have a thousand or more. 204 organisations gained new credentials in the final seven days before the snapshot.

Lifetime totals accumulate over years of captures; the 30-day and 7-day figures are the measure of current activity. A stealer-log record is produced on an infected device, usually a personal or unmanaged machine where an employee saved work passwords in the browser; it means that credential is in criminal hands, not that the organisation’s own systems were breached.

Where are universities most exposed?

Universities are most exposed in United States, where 100.0% of the 14 measured have employee credentials in stealer logs and the median organisation carries 734.5, and least exposed in Lithuania, at 85.7% of 7 with a median of 9. Countries with only a handful of organisations in this sector are listed but should be read with care.

Hit rate: share of organisations with at least one employee credential in stealer logs. Consumer mailbox hosts are excluded from employee figures. Source: Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset, October 2026.

Why no organisations are named

Universities are reported in aggregate only. Naming an exposed hospital, university or government body serves attackers more than defenders, so the per-organisation tables on this site cover companies alone. Any organisation can check its own domain with Stealercheck.

What do the stolen employee logins open?

A stealer takes every password saved on the infected machine, so the log that holds an employee’s email login usually holds their logins to the organisation’s cloud services too. Across the 291 organisations in the sector with such records, the services most often captured alongside a work email address are Autodesk Construction Cloud, Zoom and Adobe Experience Cloud. By category, Construction & Design (25.3%), Video Conferencing (14.8%) and Marketing & Creative (6.7%) lead.

Service counts are summed from each organisation’s 25 largest services; categories are the index’s own labels, lightly consolidated. An identity-provider login (Okta, Entra, Ping) is the most dangerous record in this table: it opens every application behind the organisation’s single sign-on, and the stealer usually captures the session cookie next to it.

How to use these figures

Check your own domain with Stealercheck, which returns the same lifetime, 30-day and 7-day counts, and compare the result with the median above (127 for universities). For every exposed account: reset the password, revoke active sessions so stolen cookies stop working, re-enrol MFA and find the infected device. Then block browser password saving for work accounts in favour of a managed password manager and shorten session lifetimes on single sign-on. The controls that stop the infection itself are in our guide to ransomware protection for business.

Frequently asked questions

More infostealer statistics

• Infostealer statistics: families, countries and sectors
• Stealercheck: check any domain against the same index
• Ransomware statistics: confirmed attacks by month

By country

• Australia91.2%
• Austria90.7%
• Belgium90.5%
• Brazil95.1%
• Canada91.5%
• Czechia81.6%
• Denmark84.8%
• Estonia67.7%
• Finland86.7%
• France94.5%
• Germany92.7%
• India94.2%
• Ireland80.0%
• Israel93.8%
• Italy91.3%
• Japan82.1%
• Latvia72.4%
• Lithuania72.9%
• Mexico92.7%
• Netherlands87.0%
• Nigeria87.8%
• Norway85.0%
• Poland93.2%
• Portugal94.3%
• Saudi Arabia97.5%
• Singapore82.6%
• South Africa96.7%
• South Korea88.5%
• Spain95.7%
• Sweden79.6%
• Switzerland93.5%
• Turkey97.9%
• Ukraine78.6%
• United Arab Emirates84.8%
• United Kingdom90.4%
• United States98.6%

By sector

• Airlines and transport95.6%
• Automotive82.1%
• Banking and finance88.7%
• Consumer goods81.7%
• Defence and aerospace89.5%
• E-commerce96.2%
• Gaming94.1%
• Government76.3%
• Healthcare95.8%
• Industrial87.1%
• Insurance85.4%
• Logistics and post91.2%
• Media97.8%
• Mining93.3%
• Oil, gas and energy92.5%
• Pharmaceuticals94.3%
• Retail78.0%
• Technology94.1%
• Telecoms89.4%
• Universities99.3%
• Utilities94.7%

Method. Figures come from the October 2026 snapshot of the Alerts.bar infostealer index, taken for a fixed panel of 1,874 organisation domains in 36 countries and stored by Ransomnews; the panel is held constant so that month-on-month change reflects the threat rather than the sample. Employee credentials are stealer-log records whose username is an address on the organisation’s domain (university figures include students); customer logins are credentials captured on the organisation’s own login pages; session cookies are authentication cookies harvested from infected browsers. The index reports a floor of 1 on lifetime counters, which we record as 0, and domains that host consumer mailboxes are excluded from employee figures. Full methodology and the public API: infostealer statistics. Cite as: Ransomnews Infostealer Exposure Dataset, ransomnews.com.