2025 Cybersecurity Awareness Month by the Numbers

Organizations rely on KnowBe4 to educate millions of people each month on security awareness and compliance topics, and every October, during Cybersecurity Awareness Month, engagement with our training content sets new records. 2025 was no exception.

KnowBe4 had nearly 18 million modules completed last month, including interactive training modules, games, assessments, video modules and audiocasts on KnowBe4’s Security Awareness Training (KSAT). This is a new record for us! This is also just a sample of the overall usage of our content because it excludes organizations that utilized a third-party LMS as well as organizations that opted to use custom training courses, which are often used by the largest organizations. Even as a conservative snapshot, the data reveals encouraging trends and is helpful in drawing some conclusions about how usage of SAT content is evolving.  The average number of modules completed  also significantly increased from last year, underscoring the transition from larger pieces of content to smaller, modular pieces with several different learning activities. This microlearning approach has been scientifically proven to improve end user engagement, satisfaction and encourage positive behavior.

The more popular modules last month are listed below:

The fact that none of these modules reached a million completions tells you that people are using a wide variety of modules that suit their organization. It’s also indicative of where they are on the Security Culture Maturity Model.   Seven years ago when I first started at KnowBe4, 75% of the module usage was two modules: the KSAT 45 Minute and the KSAT 30 minute modules - so shorter modules, more of a variety, and a mix of topics are the trend. Even though only two of these modules have AI in the title, they all cover AI attacks and proper AI usage which is also a trend for sure.  

This year, many organizations also used surveys and comments, so we had just over 3 million survey results about the content. Users were asked to rate the content on a scale of 1 to 5 around 3 different metrics, including the user's perception of helpfulness, length and presentation of the content. The average for last month was 4.59, up from 4.54 last year. It may seem like a small gain, but given our steady climb from 4.3 to this point, every fraction of improvement at this level represents real, hard-won progress. It’s encouraging to see people both enjoying and finding value in the content—especially since this is a remarkably high rating for required training. We regularly review training ratings and survey feedback, and we recommend organizations do the same to continually refine and improve their programs. Here is a link to a previous blog post related to using this valuable data. 

One of the biggest questions I get is what were the completion rates for people who were assigned training. There are two different types of training campaigns: mandatory and optional. So I am going to divide those out. There were nearly 10,000 organizations that rolled out optional training campaigns in October. These organizations had a solid 34% average completion rate on these campaigns. Over the course of the next few weeks for mandatory training, I expect these campaigns to be very close to 100% later this month as most organizations are now required to complete some training in their industry by law or to meet regulations. Many organizations are giving their users all of Q4 to complete and some are giving some extra weeks for training campaigns that started in October. So at the time of publication of this blog, I don’t have a fully calculated number but on-time completion has been running at about 80% for most other months in 2025. 

Lastly, we had a record of over 20% of our training done in a language other than English. We had over 10 million completions in US English and over 3 million in UK English. Below are the top 5 non-English languages by completion volume from our 44 supported languages during the month of October:

While October is a big month for cybersecurity training, we also had nearly 600,000 completions of compliance training from Compliance Plus,  which is also a record! If you are using Compliance Plus or don’t have access to the library, reach out for a demo,because combining security awareness with compliance training can save your organization time and money. 

Although October is our busiest month of the year, I have seen a trend where October is less of a high-water mark than just a few years ago. For instance, we had over 11 million completions in September and have been pretty consistently around 10 million completions per month all year long. This represents a shift where organizations are increasingly transitioning  to quarterly and monthly training as the annual training has proven to be the bare minimum and continual training programs are more effective. Sixty-seven percent of organizations have gone to at least quarterly training and this number continues to climb. We also see higher completion and survey ratings in this model than traditional, big once per year training. 

I encourage you to report your numbers to your leadership and benchmark yourself against the ratings and completion rates you see here. We are all about continuous improvement and these numbers and growth continue to drive us to do better. We always appreciate your feedback and we look forward to engaging with you to make October (and all months) in 2026 the most successful year ever! Our planning for this starts now…