As cyberthreats grow in scale and sophistication, industry leaders explain why Cybersecurity Month is a vital opportunity to strengthen awareness, resilience and collaboration.
Every October, Cybersecurity Month serves as a crucial reminder that safeguarding digital ecosystems is a shared responsibility.
With cyberattacks becoming increasingly complex and persistent, this annual initiative brings together governments, businesses and individuals to focus on improving cybersecurity practices, building resilience and sharing knowledge. In this feature, leading experts outline why the event is more important than ever – and how a proactive, collective approach can help organisations stay one step ahead of evolving threats.
Edwin Weijdema, Field CTO EMEA at Veeam
As Cybersecurity Awareness Month rolls around once again this year, it seems more obvious than ever that awareness is no longer the problem. While it’s an admirable initiative, the regular big-name cyberattacks that have become a mainstay in global news have done the job for it, keeping cybersecurity front-of-mind for businesses across the world. Instead of awareness, we need to turn to preparedness.
Organisations might have implemented cybersecurity measures after seeing headlines or simply to stay in line with regulation, but too many incident response plans still remain built on hope rather than substance. Think of it like a fire drill, you might have got the visible elements such as the extinguishers and alarms in place, but in practice, do they actually work?
Awareness might have pushed organisations to get the right tools, but now it’s time to ensure security teams know how to use these tools during a cyberattack. Testing those tools within incident response plans is essential. For some, such tests could expose hidden blind spots, and for others, they could simply boost organisational confidence in data resilience. Different organisations will be at different stages along the data resilience maturity journey, but what matters is that they are all moving in the right direction: from being aware of cyber threats, towards being genuinely prepared.
Anthony Cusimano, Chief Evangelist and Director of Solutions Marketing at Object First
Ransomware attacks are no longer just about disrupting operations—they’re increasingly targeting backups. In fact, 96% of attacks hit backup data, yet securing backups is often overlooked in cybersecurity strategies. Simply having backups isn’t enough anymore; organisations must adopt storage that ensures Absolute Immutability to prevent tampering, encryption, or deletion, ensuring recovery is always possible.
The rise of AI-generated data makes immutability even more critical. AI produces massive volumes of essential data, yet 65% of organisations back up less than half of it, leaving it vulnerable to cybercriminals.
This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, organisations must treat data protection as a core cybersecurity responsibility. Disaster Recovery plans should minimise downtime, safeguard critical assets, and align backup strategies with Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs).
Regular testing, monitoring and threat simulations ensure readiness for ransomware, insider threats and emerging cyberattacks. Investing in modern, immutable storage and comprehensive recovery plans strengthens organisational resilience, reduces cyber risk, and ensures critical data remains secure. Protecting data is no longer optional, it’s a strategic cybersecurity imperative.
Darren Guccione, CEO & Co-Founder, Keeper Security
Cybersecurity is national security. Since 2004, Cybersecurity Awareness Month has served as a reminder that protecting our nation’s digital infrastructure is inseparable from protecting our physical infrastructure. Nation-state adversaries and organised cybercriminals are launching more frequent and more sophisticated attacks than ever before, making agencies like the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) vital to our collective defence.
The majority of U.S. digital infrastructure is owned and operated by the private sector, placing businesses directly on the front lines of this battle. Public-private collaboration is no longer optional – it is essential. By sharing real-time threat intelligence, advancing zero-trust security models and implementing modern Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions, organisations can support our government agencies in strengthening our digital borders and protecting the systems that power our society.
A unified approach – with government and private industry working side by side – is the only way to stay ahead of today’s adversaries and tomorrow’s unknown threats. By embracing this collaboration and prioritisation of cybersecurity as a national security imperative, we can build a more resilient future for all.
John Mutuski, CISO, Pipedrive
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a reminder for businesses of every size to prioritise protecting their digital assets. For small businesses in particular, phishing and social engineering remain the most common threats. With limited resources, the focus should be on building employee awareness through threat-detection training, alongside good security hygiene measures such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), antivirus protection and encryption.
AI is reshaping both cyber threats and the tools used to defend against them. While it can enhance threat detection, AI is not a silver bullet—human oversight remains essential to catch errors and make informed decisions. While AI shows strong results, sales and marketing professionals surveyed in our latest annual State of Sales & Marketing report express security concerns with the emerging technology, with 35–40% of respondents citing data privacy and security as barriers. Maintaining human supervision across AI use cases is therefore critical, for example ensuring training data cannot be manipulated in ways that compromise Large Language Models (LLMs).
In today’s evolving threat landscape, resilience depends on both robust technical measures and a culture of vigilance. Organisations risk potential harm if transparency, oversight, and consent mechanisms aren’t in place. That’s why it’s vital to keep humans in the loop to provide governance, manage processes and maintain human oversight as these technologies continue to evolve.
Deann Evans, Managing Director, EMEA, Shopify
In today’s unified retail landscape, targeted threat detection has never been more important. Retail consistently ranks among the top six industries most vulnerable to cyberattacks, facing threats like credential phishing, supply chain compromises, and increasingly sophisticated session hijacking. Retailers must adopt a proactive, layered security approach to mitigate these evolving risks.
One strategy is simplifying the technology stack. Reducing complexity helps minimise the attack surface, and makes it easier to monitor for anomalies. For example, using consolidated device types can enhance visibility, tighten access control, and improve response times. Retailers should also look to integrate AI-powered threat detection and response systems into their security operations.
These tools are especially effective in targeting advanced attacks, such as session theft, that traditional tools may miss. AI tools can augment human capabilities, allowing teams to respond faster and more precisely.
Ultimately, cybersecurity is a shared responsibility. Building a security-first culture is just as important as the tools in place. Investing in awareness and embedding security into daily operations enables each individual in a business to play a role in protecting the business and its customers.
Heather Ceylan, CISO, Box
Cybersecurity Awareness Month serves as a reminder that security lives in every click, decision, and conversation. Cybersecurity is not a goal you can complete, it’s a 24/7 ongoing discipline. In today’s AI-first era, security and AI are inseparable for businesses. Our State of AI in the Enterprise report highlights that 87% of companies already use AI agents, with nearly all planning to increase AI investment in 2026.
AI is a double-edged sword; it can be a powerful catalyst for defence, enabling automation, sharper insights, and faster response – opening up opportunities that didn’t even exist before. Yet AI can also be an accelerator for the threat landscape, giving attackers automated tools to exploit human vulnerabilities.
The core truth remains: people remain the biggest security vulnerability in organisations. Enterprises can’t let AI overshadow the security fundamentals like identity controls, consistent patch management, risk monitoring and strong human oversight. Cybersecurity must stay rooted in Zero Trust principles, with Failsafes, and industry standard authentication like MFA. AI should layer on top of these foundations, strengthening defences and detecting anomalies, and reducing disruption to everyday work. In this way, AI can amplify trust, not uncertainty.
Max Gannon, Cyber Intelligence Team Manager at Cofense
Cybersecurity Awareness Month marks 22 years of public–private collaboration to strengthen digital resilience. But in today’s threat landscape, awareness alone won’t keep you in the lead. Phishing campaigns are faster, more evasive, increasingly automated, and increasingly tailored to recipients, making them harder to detect.
Credential misuse, lateral movement and social engineering now unfold in minutes, not days. The perimeter has dissolved. Data flows freely across personal devices, cloud platforms and third-party vendors, making traditional boundaries obsolete. Staying secure now means navigating a high-speed track with no guardrails!
Organisations must move beyond passive education and embrace active defence. That starts with empowering employees to report suspicious activity immediately, through frictionless channels embedded in daily workflows. It also means equipping SOC teams with the speed and visibility to respond when threats slip through.
Cybercrime may be the top enterprise risk, but a large part of that risk can be mitigated with the proper solutions and training. The most resilient organisations treat every inbox, endpoint and identity as part of a living defence system. When employees are trained to act and security teams have the tools to investigate and contain threats, incidents are stopped before they escalate. The goal is not just to keep pace with attackers but to build a security programme built for the fast lane.
Steve Povolny, Senior Director of Security Research at Exabeam
Cybersecurity Awareness Month underscores a critical, often underestimated reality: insider threats represent the most dangerous risk to organisations today. According to Exabeam research, 64% of cybersecurity leaders agree that insider threats are more dangerous than external actors, and the risk is intensifying. With the rise of Generative AI, two of the top three insider threat vectors are now AI-related.
Despite this rising threat, most organisations remain underprepared. Eighty-eight percent of security leaders say they lack the behavioral analytics needed for early detection. Meanwhile, only 44% report using User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA), a key capability for identifying abnormal activity and compromised credentials before they lead to serious incidents. Insider threats have evolved. They’re faster, more sophisticated, and increasingly AI-enabled. Security operations need to evolve, too.
Pete Luban, Field CISO at AttackIQ
Cyberthreats to organisations have never been higher than they are in 2025. With powerful cybercrime groups like Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters conducting attacks that span across the globe, as well as the proliferation of insider threats made possible by the integration of AI into attack vectors, organisations have become overwhelmed by the multitude of different angles they can be hit from.
It’s time to start fighting back and get a step ahead of the actors who seem to have organisations beat at every turn. By studying the tactics that cybercrime organisations or individual actors employ when breaching systems, security teams can train their defences to recognise when those strategies are used against them and react accordingly. Utilising adversarial emulation techniques helps cybersecurity platforms identify potential areas of exploitation and alert security teams to handle them swiftly.
Bojan Simic, CEO of HYPR
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and it’s time we talk about one of the biggest failures in enterprise security: the IT help desk.
If your help desk relies on security questions, SMS codes, or employee IDs, you’re not just failing to defend your enterprise – you’re actively handing attackers the keys. Social engineers are expertly exploiting the pressure and urgency of help desk operations, and they are succeeding because too many organisations continue to stake their security on methods that were compromised a decade ago.
The help desk shouldn’t be the weakest link; it should be the first line of defence. That means moving beyond guesswork and adopting identity verification that confirms who someone is, versus what they know or the device they’re using. With phishing-resistant, standards-based verification built into support workflows, agents stop being human lie detectors and start being defenders.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is about raising the bar. If we continue to treat the help desk as a cost centre instead of a security control, attackers will keep walking through the front door. The companies that win are the ones that stop gambling with outdated methods and start demanding certainty at every point of access, and beyond the initial request.
