It's the year 2025. Cyber attackers continue to rely on human risk factors as their easiest way in. People, our first and last line of defense, are blamed for clicking, failing, and forgetting. In reality, people aren't the problem; they're the constant. What's changed rapidly and radically is everything around them.
Work is fluid. The line between personal and professional devices has all but disappeared. Threats are faster, more sophisticated, more personalized. Technology has outpaced our ability to understand how humans engage with it. And in the rush to keep up, we've left people behind.
Human risk is the potential for individuals to contribute to security incidents through errors, negligence, or intentional actions. It encompasses a wide range of behaviors that cyber attackers commonly exploit:
Most organizations understand that they have these issues, yet their cybersecurity strategies often fail to address the root cause of them. They prescribe training to their people, deploy phishing simulations, check off compliance audit boxes, and punish failures. Yet the efficacy of these programs drives marginal improvements at best to human risk postures.
The great irony: despite clear evidence that human behavior is central to prominent cybersecurity incidents, human risk is regularly downplayed as a primary factor in data breaches. Instead, organizations and media often publicize breaches as the result of complex technical exploits. These narratives persist because they suggest that breaches are unavoidable, rare occurrences beyond our control.
The human risk factors are swept under the rug, creating a repeating cycle.
You've likely seen this playbook in action:
And while the industry loves to use the tired phrase, "people are the weakest link," the truth is they are victims of a multifaceted and ever-evolving digital hellscape lacking effective behavioral safeguards.
Let's examine a recent breach involving a prominent data protection company.
Headlines focused on the technical story: hackers compromised a Chrome extension, injected malicious code, and exploited the Chrome Web Store's auto-update mechanism. This ultimately led to the theft of Facebook credentials from end users.
A well-known narrative.
What got lost was the entry point: a phishing email and a fake login page.
It wasn't a zero-day exploit or a breach of Google's infrastructure. The attackers didn't hack the Chrome Store. They convinced a developer responsible for a popular extension that their app was at risk of being delisted. They exploited the threat of loss and a sense of urgency with an adversary in the browser style attack.
Misdiagnosis persists because cybersecurity lacks precise controls for defining, observing, and influencing unsecure behaviors in real-time. Without behavioral insights and ability to action them, security hygiene stays reactive and human risk remains unsolved.
To move beyond misdiagnosis, we must accept new axioms.
First, attackers hijack decision-making at critical security moments. They're not just exploiting software but targeting attention, emotion, and subconscious processes. If we want to counter this manipulation, our systems need to understand how people think under pressure. Risk lives in moments of uncertainty, distraction, and overload.
Second, we must recognize that human risk is fundamentally about behavior guidance and intention rendering. If attackers target how people think, then good defenses must do the same. We won't fix human risk with more training modules; we solve it by guiding behavior in the moment and supporting people's intentions before they turn into risky actions. Human risk isn't a knowledge gap; it's a context gap.
Third and most importantly, we can finally treat cybersecurity as a user experience problem to be solved. When guidance is intuitive, built around how people work, and supports their cognition in peak moments, security will stop being a friction point, and secure habits will become second nature. And if the individual is protected, security cultures become more resilient and organizations are safer.
Most security problems are rooted in human thinking, thus they demand a thinking solution.
Enter cognitive security.
Cognitive security applies the concepts of cognitive psychology to the domain of cybersecurity. That means protecting people from engaging in risky behaviors regardless of their origin: manipulation by bad actors, due to a lack of training, by accident or mistake, and even because of purposeful subversion.
It combines psychological, behavioral science, and neuroscience principles with advanced technology to defend against increasingly complex cognitive threats.
When applied to cybersecurity, a cognitive security solution should safeguard behaviors in real-time by understanding usage intent and guiding secure decision-making at the moment of need, and in combination with human-machine teaming.
In everyday terms, cognitive security protects the judgment of people and organizations alike; even when attackers exploit trust, empathy, or urgency.
Effective cognitive security looks like:
A strong human risk posture starts by designing for decision-making because that's precisely where attackers aim. Cognitive security makes that possible.
Cognitive security isn't new, but it's critical now more than ever. Researchers and scientists from world-renowned institutions have spent the last decade exploring how human cognition can be vulnerable and resilient to manipulation tactics.
Interest in cognitive security continues to accelerate, too. Notable examples include a $6 million Department of Defense grant awarded to Texas A&M University in 2023 to pioneer new defensive strategies, a foundational 2020 research paper from the University of Texas at San Antonio published in Frontiers in Psychology outlining key cognitive factors that shape human decision-making, and a comprehensive 2023 study and corresponding book by researchers at New York University that present detailed cognitive security solutions and frameworks.
Researchers are mapping how cognition, context, and cybersecurity intersect. They highlight why cognitive defense is uniquely suited to address the complexities of today's cybersecurity threats. Most notable is the development of frameworks that can help cybersecurity practitioners infuse cognitive defensive approaches into their programs and risk models.
For example, Montañez R, Golob E and Xu S's publication, "Human Cognition Through the Lens of Social Engineering Cyberattacks", uncovers several prominent findings:
Let's unpack that last one.
In critical moments, a person's actions emerge from interactions between short-term and long-term cognitive factors in conjunction with long-term memory. Collectively, these interactions determine human behavior.
Unfortunately, they're also highly susceptible to social engineering cyberattacks.
Short-term cognition factors represent the current state. These factors contribute significantly to performance impairment in the moment:
Long-term cognition factors reflect more consistent attributes about a person and their general disposition when facing social engineering threats:
Behaviors evolve into secure habits through consistent reinforcement and deliberate control design that accounts for both short-term cognitive states and long-term cognitive attributes.
Over time, repeated engagement decreases cognitive effort and increases automaticity, or the ability to perform a task or skill effortlessly and without conscious thought, shifting secure actions from conscious decisions to deeply ingrained habits.
In short, cognitive security makes secure behavior responses second nature.
Now, let's revisit a familiar story to show what cognitive security looks like at a point of failure:
A team member receives an email flagged as "urgent" from what appears to be IT, warning that their VPN access will be revoked unless they log in immediately. The login page looks nearly identical to the company's real portal. It's early in the morning; the person is rushing to prep for a call with the executive team. They enter their credentials without thinking twice.
(Note: We're not here to play hindsight hero. We've changed the details to focus on the behavior, not the headline.)
Instead of relying on static training to cover phishing scenarios retroactively, a cognitive security solution like Maro recognizes the behavioral context: time of day, stress indicators, device pattern, website analysis, and indicators of manipulation intent.
Before they can even submit credentials, they're prompted with an early warning: "Signs of phishing detected. Does this login page look familiar? Examine before you continue." That moment of reflection interrupts the autopilot response and reinforces a habit of pausing before clicking. It also acts as an important behavior safeguard.
Cognitive security will strengthen your workforce's resilience against manipulation and risky decision-making, creating a more robust security posture that leverages the natural tendencies of human behavior rather than fighting against it.
The human attack surface has fundamentally shifted. AI-powered social engineering threats aren't just after what people know; they hijack how people think. Traditional awareness-based approaches are insufficient in this new landscape. Attackers exploit subtle psychological vulnerabilities to bypass defenses, and phishing tests are demoralizing teams. As the WSJ put it, they've gotten "downright mean."
Security culture isn't getting stronger; it's fraying under pressure.
At the same time, digital environments grow more complex. People frequently find themselves required to navigate high-stakes security decisions without clear guidance or effective safeguards. Attention spans are fragmented by constant digital noise, inboxes and messaging platforms are weaponized with carefully crafted influence attacks, and people no longer feel in control of their digital destiny.
They are becoming even more vulnerable to exploitation.
Psychological drivers like attention, stress, and motivation are no longer personal or productivity challenges. They represent critical security vulnerabilities.
Cognitive security reframes these factors from weaknesses into opportunities for strategic intervention and proactive defense. It's a human-centered path forward, aligning cybersecurity measures with human behavior, decision-making patterns, and secure behavioral guidance.
Cognitive security will fundamentally reshape how we approach cybersecurity. It offers concrete advantages that address human risk in ways that current solutions can't even touch.
Imagine…
By applying insights from cognitive science, security teams can design adaptive systems that effectively reduce susceptibility to manipulation and strengthen an organization's security culture in an era defined by psychological exploitation. Until security programs imbue sound principles of cognitive security, human risk reduction efforts are destined to fail.
Adopting cognitive security principles doesn't have to be difficult. Maro can help.👇
Longtchi, T. T., Rodriguez, R. M., Gwartney, K., Ear, E., Azari, D. P., Kelley, C. P., & Xu, S. (2024). Quantifying psychological sophistication of malicious emails. arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.12217. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2408.12217
Montañez, R., Golob, E., & Xu, S. (2020). Human cognition through the lens of social engineering cyberattacks. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 1755. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01755
Huang, L., & Zhu, Q. (2023). Cognitive security: A system-scientific approach. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30709-6