Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many cyber security related incidents affected (a) further education colleges and (b) higher education institutions in 2017.

The Department for Education does not hold this information.

Jisc, who provide ICT infrastructure services to further education (FE) colleges and higher education (HE) institutions, reported that in 2017 the Jisc Security Operations Centre responded to 5,023 security incidents or queries from HE and FE in England. These include malware, phishing, copyright infringements, compromise, denial of service and RIPA requests. The impact of an incident varies greatly from minimal to significant.

Of these 1,389 incidents or queries were from FE institutions in England and 3,634 from HE institutes.