What is Cybersecurity Culture? A Practical Guide

Human error accounts for 95% of cybersecurity breaches (IBM Security, 2024). But here is what that statistic misses: employees in organisations with poor security culture are 52 times more likely to share their login credentials during phishing attacks (KnowBe4, 2025). The problem is not your people. It is your culture.

Emerging threats like ClickFix prove that even the best technical controls fail if users haven't been trained to spot manual execution lures."

Get articles like this delivered to your inbox. Subscribe to CyberDesserts for practical security insights, no fluff.

What is Cybersecurity Culture?

Cybersecurity culture is the collective attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours that shape how an organisation approaches security. It determines whether employees view security as "IT's problem" or as a shared responsibility woven into daily work.

A strong security culture means employees instinctively question suspicious emails, report anomalies without fear of blame, and understand how their actions affect organisational risk. A weak culture produces compliance theatre: policies exist on paper while workarounds flourish in practice.

The distinction matters because technical controls alone cannot compensate for cultural failures. Firewalls do not prevent an employee from sharing credentials with a convincing attacker. Endpoint detection does not stop someone from disabling MFA because it slows them down.

Strong vs Weak Cybersecurity Culture

Why Cybersecurity Culture Matters

From 20+ years in cybersecurity, I keep seeing the same pattern. Organisations invest in advanced security tools while basic hygiene failures leave the front door wide open. Multi-factor authentication disabled for "convenience." Credentials leaked in breaches and never rotated. Security controls deployed but misconfigured or turned off. Service account passwords unchanged for 20 years.

These issues compound over time. You are watching that slow, painful death by a thousand paper cuts.

The data confirms what practitioners observe daily. Teams experiencing emotional disengagement have almost 3x as many internal security incidents (Forrester, 2024). Teams operating in fear of retribution experience nearly 4x as many internal incidents. When security becomes a blame exercise, people disengage entirely or actively work around controls.

The Knowing-Doing Gap

Here is what organisations realise too late: the gap is not knowledge. Everyone knows patching matters. The disconnect is between knowing what to do and investing the time to implement it consistently when budgets are tight and business demands are loud.

Research from CybSafe reveals this knowing-doing gap clearly. Confidence in security knowledge rises while actual secure behaviours decline. Nearly half of employees feel confident spotting phishing, yet only 45% consistently check for signs or report suspicious messages.

Squeezed budgets freeze hiring and push teams toward shiny new tools that do not solve the fundamentals or challenge existing security controls.

Core Principles of Cybersecurity Culture

Building effective security culture requires more than awareness training. It demands structural changes to how organisations treat security behaviour.

Psychological Safety

Employees must feel safe reporting security concerns without fear of punishment. This includes reporting their own mistakes. A culture where admitting "I clicked a suspicious link" triggers disciplinary action is a culture where incidents go unreported until they become breaches.

Research from the University of Vaasa (2025) confirms that stress, pressure, and unsupportive work culture contribute directly to both intentional and unintentional security incidents. Employees in toxic environments create workarounds, bypass policies, and avoid reporting problems.

Leadership Commitment

Security culture flows from the top. When executives bypass MFA, share credentials, or dismiss security concerns as obstacles to business objectives, they signal that security rules apply only to lower-level employees.

Rob Lee, Chief of Research at SANS Institute, puts it directly: "A strong culture rewards defenders for their response and resilience, not punishes them for uncovering a problem." This extends to backing security teams on investment decisions rather than consistently prioritising spend elsewhere.

Continuous Learning

Annual compliance training does not change behaviour. Effective security culture requires ongoing reinforcement through simulations, real-world examples, and regular touchpoints that keep security awareness fresh.

The challenge is that security competes with "doing business" and hygiene gets deprioritised because it is not interesting enough. Meanwhile, shadow AI emerges alongside shadow IT, and the threat landscape evolves faster than most security programmes can adapt.

Security as Enabler

Cultures that position security as a blocker to productivity create adversarial relationships. Employees view security teams as obstacles to overcome rather than partners in risk management. The most effective cultures position security controls as enablers that protect the organisation's ability to operate.

Building Cybersecurity Culture in Organisations

According to the WEF Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025, organisations that exceed their cyber resilience requirements share common characteristics. They have dedicated support teams to help employees report concerns, anonymous reporting channels, non-punitive policies, and include security incident reporting as a positive metric in performance evaluations.

This is not about being soft on security. It is about creating conditions where secure behaviour becomes natural rather than forced.

What Resilient Organisations Do Differently

Organisations with mature security cultures implement specific structural elements:

• Dedicated support channels: Teams or individuals employees can approach with security questions without triggering formal incident processes
• Anonymous reporting: Mechanisms for flagging concerns without attribution, particularly useful for reporting leadership behaviour
• Non-punitive policies: Clear documentation that honest reporting of security concerns or mistakes will not result in disciplinary action
• Positive metrics: Security reporting included in performance evaluations as a positive contribution rather than measured only when something goes wrong
• Executive participation: Leadership visibly using the same security controls expected of everyone else

Does your CEO know it is only a matter of time, and that so far, you have just been lucky?

How to Improve Your Cybersecurity Culture

Changing culture requires sustained effort, not a single initiative. Here is a practical framework for improvement.

Start with Assessment

You cannot improve what you do not measure. Establish a baseline understanding of your current security culture through surveys, incident analysis, and behavioural observation. Look for patterns in how employees respond to security events and whether reporting channels are actually used.

Secure Executive Buy-In

Cultural change without leadership support fails. Present the business case using data relevant to your organisation: breach costs, regulatory penalties, operational disruption. Connect security culture to business outcomes executives already care about.

Frame the conversation around risk rather than compliance. Compliance is a minimum standard. Risk management protects the business.

Move from Awareness to Behaviour Change

Traditional awareness training measures completion rates, not behaviour change. Shift focus to measurable outcomes: phishing simulation click rates, incident reporting volumes, time to report suspicious activity.

Design interventions that address specific behaviours rather than general knowledge. If employees are not reporting phishing attempts, investigate why. Fear of being wrong? Unclear process? No perceived benefit? Address the root cause, not the symptom.

Measure Culture, Not Just Compliance

Track metrics that indicate cultural health:

• Voluntary incident reporting rates (not just confirmed incidents)
• Time between employee awareness of an issue and formal report
• Employee survey results on security team approachability
• Participation in optional security initiatives
• Reduction in workarounds and policy exceptions requested

Summary

With supply chain attacks doubling in 2025 and AI-driven threats industrialising at unprecedented scale, organisations cannot afford security programmes built on fear and compliance alone.

True cyber resilience requires a holistic approach across four critical domains:

1. Governance and Policy: Formal frameworks where leadership actively champions security, not just signs off on policies
2. Technical Controls: Detection and prevention capabilities that support rather than obstruct employee workflows
3. Data Security: Classification and access controls that employees understand and can follow without friction
4. People and Awareness: Continuous behavioural training, not annual compliance checkboxes

Your security culture is the foundation connecting all four domains. Technical controls fail when employees fear reporting. Policies fail when leadership ignores them. Data security fails when workflows force risky workarounds.

Compromising on basics does not just slow business down. It erodes trust and ends up costing far more to fix than the original issue. The organisations that thrive will be those that invest in people, training, readiness checks, validating controls, building awareness, and nurturing a positive cyber culture. These are the fundamentals that actually prevent breaches.

This guide gets updated as the landscape shifts. Subscribers receive notifications when major changes happen, plus weekly practical security content. No sales pitches, no fluff.

Key Resources:

• Cyber Awareness Training: Behavioural Methods That Work
• Shadow AI Maturity Assessment
• Threat Shifts That Defined the 2025 Security Landscape
• AI Security Threats Hitting Organisations in 2025
• WEF Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025

References and Sources

1. IBM Security (2024). Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024. Analysis of breach root causes showing 95% involve human error. IBM and Ponemon Institute.
2. KnowBe4 (2025). Security Culture Report. Global survey finding employees in poor security cultures are 52x more likely to share credentials in phishing attacks.
3. Forrester Research (2024). Security Culture Impact Study. Analysis showing teams with emotional disengagement experience 3x more internal incidents; fear-based cultures see 4x increases.
4. Verizon (2025). Data Breach Investigations Report. 60% of breaches involve human behaviour.
5. World Economic Forum and Accenture (2025). Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2025. Analysis of factors differentiating cyber-resilient organisations.
6. CybSafe (2025). Oh, Behave! Annual Cybersecurity Attitudes and Behaviors Report. Survey of 7,000+ participants across 7 countries revealing the knowing-doing gap.
7. University of Vaasa (2025). Insider Deviant Behavior in Cybersecurity. Doctoral research on workplace culture and security incidents.

Last updated: December 2025