This infographic examines why lateral email attacks are unusually prevalent in higher education, particularly among students. Once a university account is compromised, attackers can exploit built-in trust to target other users inside the same institution, creating a self-propagating cycle that effectively resets with each new class. Students experience a 14.9% overall lateral attack rate, 5.5 times the global average, while one in eight phishing attacks received by students originates inside their institution. Lateral BEC represents 33% of BEC across higher education and 54% when students are targeted. Contributing factors include constant account turnover, password reuse, dormant accounts, and trusted .edu identities. Because internally sourced attacks look legitimate at the infrastructur

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