Banks, retailers and healthcare companies may seem like obvious targets for fraud. But cybercriminals are increasingly finding opportunity in organizations built around a very different objective: serving communities.
Schools, universities, charities and other nonprofits can hold substantial amounts of personal and financial information while interacting with sprawling networks of employees, students, donors, volunteers, vendors and community members. That combination of valuable data and trusted relationships creates plenty for fraudsters to exploit.
Trust Has Become an Attack Surface
Many of the schemes threatening these organizations do not begin with sophisticated hacking. They begin with someone pretending to be someone else.
A fraudulent email that appears to come from an executive may request an urgent payment. A compromised vendor account can deliver fake banking instructions. A criminal posing as a staff member, donor or service provider may try to obtain credentials or personal information.
The scale of this broader problem is significant. The FBI’s Internet Crime Report recorded nearly $20.9 billion in reported cybercrime losses last year, with business email compromise (BEC) alone accounting for more than $3 billion.
For organizations where a familiar name or seemingly legitimate request can carry considerable weight, identity verification becomes as important as traditional cybersecurity.
Education Offers a Wide Target
Education illustrates just how exposed highly connected organizations can become. A Center for Internet Security report, produced with the Consortium for School Networking, found that 82% of reporting K-12 schools experienced cyber threat impacts between July 2023 and December 2024 — more than 9,300 confirmed incidents across roughly 5,000 institutions. The report noted that attackers increasingly target the human element through phishing and social engineering, often by impersonating trusted officials, rather than exploiting technical weaknesses.
Beyond system disruption, stolen credentials and personal information can fuel identity theft that occurs later alongside phishing and social-engineering attempts. Third-party platforms, vendors and large user populations can add still more identities and access points that institutions must manage.
Nonprofits Have Something Else Criminals Want: Credibility
For nonprofits, attackers can exploit both organizational infrastructure and the public trust attached to a charitable name.
The IRS includes fake charities among its 2026 warnings about charitable contribution scams, noting that criminals may create fraudulent charities—particularly following disasters or tragedies—to obtain money and personal information.
Legitimate nonprofits must therefore think beyond protecting bank accounts. Brand impersonation, donor information, employee identities and payment processes can all become fraud vectors.
Security Needs to Follow the Identity
The answer is not to make schools and nonprofits less accessible. It is to make trust harder to counterfeit.
Organizations can strengthen defenses by using multifactor authentication, limiting access to sensitive systems, independently verifying changes to payment instructions and creating clear procedures for reporting suspicious activity. Just as importantly, employees, donors, volunteers and other stakeholders should know how to recognize impersonation attempts and where to turn when something feels wrong.
Fraud prevention also cannot stop at the organizational perimeter. Once personal information, credentials, or identifying details are exposed, criminals may reuse them in phishing, account takeover and identity theft schemes long after the original incident.
For education and nonprofit organizations, that makes identity protection an important extension of cybersecurity. Protecting the people connected to the organization—not just its networks and accounts—can help reduce the lasting impact of fraud while preserving the trust these organizations depend on to fulfill their mission.
LibertyID Business Solutions offers customer information security protocols, information security training, third-party vendor management, and post-breach response services—helping businesses protect consumer data and meet the FTC Safeguards Rule and state compliance requirements. The package also includes our gold-standard identity fraud restoration services for employees and their families.