Doppel Email Security is now generally available
The agentic email security solution that empowers you to fight back against social engineering attacks. Detection isn't enough. Disruption is the difference.
Social Engineering Defense for Education
In education, your staff, your students, and your donors are all targets. A phishing email to a business office employee, a vishing call to an IT helpdesk agent, a fraudulent appeal impersonating your advancement office or a trusted alum, or a bot posing as a student to siphon financial aid can disrupt operations, drain institutional and donor funds, and expose the personal data of students, staff, and supporters for years to come. Doppel trains your people to recognize these attacks and takes down the ones that get through, before they reach your institution, your staff, and your community.
Protecting education institutions
By the numbers
Social engineering in education
~45%
more human-targeted attacks than other techniques against U.S. educational institutions (Jul 2023–Dec 2024)
22%
of K-12 ransomware traced to phishing as the root cause
$30M+
stolen from California community colleges since 2024, with a 64% suspected fraud rate at one district
Where Education Risk Starts
Modern attacks on educational institutions are engineered to exploit open-access enrollment, limited security budgets, and a workforce, student body, and donor community accustomed to responding quickly to routine requests.
The human element is the most consistent point of entry.
Helpdesk and IT Support Targeting
Attackers impersonate staff and vendors to deceive IT helpdesk teams into resetting passwords and granting access to student information systems, sometimes through third-party support portals lacking multi-factor authentication.
Staff and Administrative Phishing
Business office, HR, and superintendent-level staff are disproportionately targeted with phishing designed to compromise credentials tied to payroll, financial aid, and student records systems.
Executive and Staff Impersonation
Business email compromise and spoofed communications targeting superintendents, administrators, and finance staff enable fraudulent wire transfers and payroll diversion.
Donor, Alumni, and Advancement Fraud
Attackers impersonate advancement officers, university foundations, and even alumni themselves to solicit fraudulent donations, redirect gift payments through spoofed giving portals, and run BEC-style wire fraud targeting endowment and capital campaign funds.
Financial Aid and Enrollment Fraud
AI-driven bot students and fraud rings enroll in online courses using stolen or fabricated identities to collect financial aid disbursements, straining institutional resources and displacing real students.
Student, Staff, and Donor Data Exposure
Leaked student, staff, and donor PII, often from compromised third-party vendors and ed-tech platforms, fuels downstream identity theft and regulatory exposure under FERPA and state privacy laws.
Legacy Training and Under-Resourced Workforce Risk
Limited security budgets and generic annual training leave administrative staff, faculty, and advancement teams poorly equipped for the AI-driven social engineering and fraud tactics targeting institutions today.
How it works
Built for Modern Educational Institutions
Most schools, colleges, and universities rely on fragmented tools that only address part of the threat, flooding thinly staffed security teams with noise. Doppel unifies detection, correlation, and automated takedowns with multi-channel simulation, red teaming, and training.
Helpdesk Resilience and IT Support Training
Build IT helpdesk resilience through hyper-realistic multi-channel simulations targeting the identity verification and password reset workflows attackers actively exploit.
Staff and Faculty Readiness
Equip administrative staff, faculty, and advancement teams to recognize and respond to modern social engineering through training built around education-specific attack patterns.
Red Teaming and Insider Risk
Uncover insider risk and social engineering exposure through red teaming targeting helpdesk, business office, and advancement functions.
Employee Readiness and Compliance
Build the behavioral evidence needed for FERPA and state privacy law audits.
Executive and Staff Impersonation Detection
Detect and take down fraudulent communications impersonating superintendents, administrators, and finance staff before funds are diverted.
Donor and Alumni Impersonation Detection
Detect and take down fraudulent giving portals, spoofed advancement office communications, and fake alumni or donor accounts before gifts are redirected or donor trust is damaged.
Financial Aid and Enrollment Fraud Detection
Identify and disrupt fraudulent enrollment schemes and bot-driven financial aid fraud before disbursements go out.
Student, Staff, and Donor Data Exposure Identification
Identify exposed records, credentials, and PII on dark web forums before attackers can weaponize them.
Automated Takedown of Malicious Assets
Automate the removal of phishing infrastructure, fraudulent portals, and impersonation accounts targeting your institution.
Campaign-Level Threat Visibility
Centralize visibility across channels into a single view of coordinated attack activity.
Impact
Protect Your Institution. Defend Your Students and Staff. Stay Ahead of AI-Driven Threats.
Build a Resilient, Social Engineering-Ready Institution
- Reduce phishing and pretexting risk across helpdesk, business office, and advancement functions through realistic simulation.
- Equip staff with education-specific training built around real attacker tactics, not generic annual compliance content.
- Uncover insider risk and measure human vulnerability across IT, administrative, and advancement teams.
- Build compliance-ready evidence of human risk reduction for FERPA and state privacy requirements.
Protect Donors, Students, and Institutional Trust
- Stop BEC and payroll diversion attacks targeting finance and administrative staff.
- Prevent donor and alumni impersonation before gifts are redirected or fundraising trust is damaged.
- Reduce exposure to fraudulent enrollment and financial aid schemes.
- Protect student, staff, and donor records from being weaponized or sold on dark web markets.
Improve Operational Efficiency and Business Protection
- Reduce security team fatigue and eliminate fragmented workflows across IT, business office, and advancement functions.
- Protect institutional trust, prevent operational disruption, and safeguard financial aid and fundraising integrity.
Doppel Platform
Connected intelligence delivers comprehensive protection
Safeguard your brand, leaders, and business from social engineering attacks with the most comprehensive social engineering defense platform.
Brand Protection
Protect your brand, preserve trust
Protect your digital brand by continuously detecting and disrupting impersonation and fraudulent activity across digital channels through unified intelligence and real-time monitoring, stopping threats before they escalate.
Executive Protection
Defend leadership, protect the business
Protect high-risk leaders from targeted social engineering, doxxing, impersonation, and deepfake attacks by continuously monitoring personal data exposure and threat activity across open and dark channels. Rapid mitigation and risk-based guidance reduce executive attack surface and response time.
Simulation
Retire the phishing test, launch the simulation
Doppel Simulation delivers measurable business impact through realistic simulations and awareness training. Every scenario is designed to reveal real vulnerabilities, build response readiness, and feed directly into your defense strategy, turning training into tangible risk reduction.
Security Awareness Training
Train your teams. Build resilience.
Doppel Security Awareness Training strengthens employee defenses against the latest attacker tactics with tailored, deepfake-enabled, threat-informed training and personalized coaching. Every training is relevant, engaging, and designed to build resilience against modern security threats.
Email Security
Fight back against social engineering attacks.
Doppel Email Security empowers organizations to take an active role in their defense against phishing attacks with unmatched accuracy, agentic disruption, and actionable insights. Powered by external attack infrastructure intelligence from the Doppel Threat Graph and agentic AI, it is trained on billions of signals from across the internet to catch what other tools miss and stop the campaign in its tracks.
Phishing Triage
Stop phishing attacks faster and more accurately.
Stop sophisticated phishing that bypasses filters. Doppel Phishing Triage uses agentic AI to turn employee signals into machine-speed remediation and defense. Doppel Phishing Triage enables teams to defend against sophisticated phishing attacks that bypass email security filters through efficient, accurate, and scalable automated triage and remediation of employee-submitted emails.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions
Why are educational institutions particularly vulnerable to social engineering?
Schools, colleges, and universities combine large volumes of sensitive data with comparatively limited security budgets and open-access enrollment. Human-targeted attacks have been the primary vector against U.S. educational institutions, exceeding other techniques by about 45%.
How does Doppel help educational institutions build a more resilient workforce?
Doppel Simulation delivers hyper-realistic multi-channel simulations built around real education-sector attack patterns, reinforced by Security Awareness Training tailored to business office, IT, and advancement workflows.
How does Doppel protect university advancement offices from donor and alumni fraud?
Advancement and development offices face the same BEC tactics that target corporate finance teams, including fraudulent appeals impersonating university leaders and spoofed giving portals. Doppel detects and takes down fraudulent donor communications, fake alumni accounts, and spoofed giving pages, while Security Awareness Training equips advancement staff to recognize these tactics before funds are redirected.
What types of threats does Doppel protect educational institutions against?
Doppel detects and removes threats including executive, staff, and donor impersonation, phishing-driven ransomware entry points, fraudulent enrollment schemes, and PII exposure on dark web forums. Explore all use cases.
We already have student information system and network security tools; where does Doppel fit?
Those tools protect your internal systems. Doppel protects your institution and people from threats that originate outside them. See Campaign-Level Threat Visibility.
What's the impact of not proactively addressing external threats?
Unmanaged threats lead to financial aid fraud, donor and alumni fraud, ransomware disruption, and long-term exposure of student, staff, and donor data.
Learn how Doppel can protect your brand from social engineering attacks.
Join hundreds of companies already using our platform to protect their brand and people from social engineering attacks.