Security experts warn that AI has drastically reduced the cost and complexity of cyberattacks, and higher education’s sprawling digital footprint is an attractive target. Joint studies from cloud security firms found agentic tools can execute sophisticated offensive tasks for under $50 in compute costs, producing successful exploit attempts at scale. At the same time, higher-ed IT leaders are grappling with new DOJ web‑accessibility deadlines, legacy systems and rising attack surfaces. Institutions are being urged to prioritize identity security for machine accounts, patch governance, and incident-response investment as AI-enabled threats proliferate.