Remote learning is now an inevitable reality for academic institutions. Even before the pandemic, remote learning was on the rise. The pandemic has only made that trend more pervasive and dominant across institutions, most notably among the public schools. The Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), a federally funded threat intelligence and cybersecurity advisory organization, recorded a 19% increase in cyberattacks targeting K-12 schools in the 2019-2020 school year.

Social engineering is an insidious way of getting "insider access" into an organization's network and data. Threat actors use it to gain sweeping access to carry out sophisticated attacks while evading detection. This "insider" leeway of social engineering makes it an alarming threat that cybercriminals are routinely exploiting now more than ever.