Fall has officially arrived—and along with cooler weather, football weekends, and changing leaves comes something just as important: Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CAM).
Established in 2004, Cybersecurity Awareness Month has grown from a niche initiative into a global movement that highlights the human side of cybersecurity. For organizations, it’s a chance to refresh strategies, engage employees, and strengthen defenses against phishing, ransomware, and other evolving threats.
Below is a plan you can adapt so that by November 1st, your organization feels more resilient than it did on September 30th.
Why Cybersecurity Awareness Month Matters
Cyber threats today are faster, smarter, and more damaging than ever:
- Phishing emails have matured from obvious typos and grainy logos into slick, AI-generated and hard to detect traps.
- Ransomware actors now operate like they are part of the Fortune 500, complete with customer service desks and double extortion tactics that leak data even after victims pay.
- According to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, the median time to exploit a new vulnerability is just five days.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is your annual reminder to stay ahead of attackers—and empower your staff to become a critical line of defense.
4 Practical Tips for Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025
Now, if you run a quick Google search for “Cybersecurity Awareness Month kit,” you’ll find many free resources. Our personal favorite comes from KnowBe4. We use them here at WIN and offer it to many of our customers. Their kit includes themed posters, bitesize videos, phishing simulation templates, and a slick planning guide that breaks the month into weekly themes and ideas. With that kit (or one like it) in hand, here are four tips we’d recommend building into your October Cybersecurity Awareness Program.
1. Put Cybersecurity Front and Center
Habits form through repetition. Keep security top-of-mind by:
- Rotating weekly posters on topics like phishing red flags or ransomware hygiene.
- Sharing short, engaging training videos.
- Adding a 5-minute security “show and tell” to staff meetings.
By the end of each week, employees will have absorbed cybersecurity tips through multiple touchpoints, helping turn quick refreshers into lasting employee cybersecurity training.
2. Build a Security-First Culture
Technology alone isn’t enough. A true security-first culture makes every employee part of the defense.
- Reinforce that security is everyone’s responsibility—not just IT.
- Celebrate employees who report suspicious activity.
- Turn mistakes into learning opportunities rather than punishments.
When employees see security as part of their role, your organization becomes much harder to breach.
3. Host a Patching Party
Unpatched systems are an attacker’s favorite target. This October:
- Schedule a “patching party”. Order pizza, book a conference room, and spend an afternoon updating the applications, routers, and firewalls that need it.
- Prioritize upcoming deadlines—such as Windows 10 leaving mainstream support on October 14, 2025.
Remember attackers love low-hanging fruit. Most successful breaches exploit vulnerabilities that already have patches available. Hitting “update” may feel mundane, but it’s one of the simplest forms of risk reduction you will find.
If you walk the halls here at WIN long enough, you’ll likely hear someone from the security team yell out “Always Update!”.
4. Harden Your Systems
Some risks can’t be patched away. Dedicate time to:
- Turning off unused services.
- Enforcing multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Restricting software installation privileges.
- Checking configurations against industry benchmarks.
A few hours of hardening now can prevent costly incident response later.
A 5-Day Cybersecurity Challenge to Kickstart CAM
Want to launch Cybersecurity Awareness Month with momentum? Try this micro-challenge:
- Day 1: Password party: update key accounts with 14+ character passphrases and introduce a password manager so no one resorts to sticky notes.
- Day 2: Patch all systems: operating system updates, firmware, and browser versions, etc.
- Day 3: Audit browser and email extensions, removing unnecessary or risky add-ons.
- Day 4: Host a phishing lunch-and-learn with real-world examples (typos, spoofed sender names, urgent language, etc.) and let staff practice spotting some red flags.
- Day 5: Verify backups. If you don’t have any, start creating them!
Keep Cybersecurity a Year-Round Priority
After that first week, the sky’s the limit. Run an incident-response drill. Invite local law enforcement to talk about cybercrime trends they’re seeing in the area. Schedule quarterly or monthly training refreshers.
The goal is to keep security top-of-mind even after the October Cybersecurity Awareness Month posters are put away.
Carrying Security Beyond October
As an IT services provider, we get pretty excited about Cybersecurity Awareness Month 2025, but it should resonate with any organization that depends on trust. Customers assume you’ll safeguard their data, privacy, and the services you deliver. The threats behind every click, website visit, and file download are real. But so are the defenses.
The resources are available, many of them free, and the people inside your organization are ready to do the right thing once they know what “right” looks like. One of our favorites is the KnowBe4 Cybersecurity Awareness Month Kit, which includes posters, videos, phishing templates, and a planning guide you can use right away.
Let’s use Cybersecurity Awareness Month to its full potential—not as a one-time campaign, but as a 31-day springboard that sets the tone for the other 334. Together, we can build a culture of security, strengthen our systems, and deliver on the promises we make to customers.
Here’s to a productive, engaging, and breach-free October.