National Cybersecurity Alliance publishes five-year cybersecurity behavior report

The National Cybersecurity Alliance and CybSafe published the Oh, Behave! Cybersecurity Attitudes and Behaviors Report: 2021–2025, a five-year study that examined changes in people’s cybersecurity attitudes, habits and behaviors and identified gaps between awareness and sustained protective action.

The report found familiarity with core protections increased while steady secure behavior declined, and that reported cybercrime incidents rose to 44% in 2025, a 10% increase from the prior year; researchers also described a growing sense that online harm had become routine and expressed rising concern about threats.

Researchers built the analysis on data collected annually since 2021 from more than 25,000 adults across multiple countries and applied behavioral science using the COM-B framework. The report said awareness of multi-factor authentication rose from 52% in 2021 to 77% in 2025 while regular Multifactor Authentication (MFA) use fell to 53% after a 94% peak in 2022, and respondents who always installed updates declined from 44% to 31%.

Consistent data backups dropped to 22% by 2025. Access to cybersecurity training remained limited: more than half reported no access across the period, peaking at 64% in 2023 and measuring 55% in 2025, while training use reached 32% in 2025, up from 27% in 2021. Reported cybercrime incidents rose to 44% in 2025, with phishing at 40% of incidents, online dating scams rising from 22% to 29%, and cyberbullying from 13% to 23%.

“Long-term data shows this isn’t about people being careless or uninformed,” said Oz Alashe MBE, CEO and Founder of CybSafe. “Across five years, we see motivated individuals struggling against time pressure, complexity, and security fatigue. These insights give organizations the evidence they need to design security approaches that align with how people actually behave – not how we assume they do.”

The report said organizations could use the findings to design security approaches aligned with actual behavior to support more sustained secure habits.