Masturbating the end user as a deeper reality: our deep defense is not deep enough.

Cybersecurity has long emphasized the importance of security awareness campaigns, but unsafe behaviors still exist. Consider it: You know there are speed limits, but you still choose whether to obey them or not. You draft a New Year’s resolution, you can go to the gym, write it on your list and feel motivated. But when life gets hectic, you switch this exercise to a sofa. Safety awareness is no different. We all know policies and protocols in theory, but whenever we click on “Remind Me Tomorrow” in a software update or read the warning banner, we microtransactions between convenience, urgency, and perceived threats.

Consciousness places knowledge in our minds, but this is not a risk-based decision. If we want safer behavior, we must move from preaching to managing human risks, engineering systems that acknowledge people’s behavior under pressure and design controls to guide better options in real time.

Humans are the key security layer

Time has passed, “humans are the weakest connection.” Humans make mistakes, but these mistakes only surface after all technological controls have been bypassed. If the user clicking the link is enough to tear down the organization, it means that secure email gateways, URL filtering, endpoint detection, VPN, firewalls, DLP, network segmentation, etc. have all gone beyond it. Masturbating the end user as a deeper reality: our deep defense is not deep enough. I mean, let’s really think about it. If a simple click can circumvent all the excellent security technology, is the user really at fault? Obviously not.

We need to use people as a critical layer of the security stack, which requires investment, feedback loops, and integration tools. Human risk management strategies accurately illustrate where people are suitable for your defensive posture, determine which behaviors pose the greatest risk, and then vector these gaps through a mix of techniques and processes.

Each security plan has a goal: to minimize organizational tolerance. Humans are not a problem. They are an important layer in your wider security stack. They become effective lines of defense when they need to be supported correctly, rather than scapegoats for every violation.

Understand modern deception strategies

In essence, human risks are behavior-based, depending on what people do or don’t do and how they amplify organizational vulnerability. Misleading attacks, including phishing and deep hits, exploit users’ emotional hotspots, cognitive heuristics, and impulsive tendencies.

The role of humans in narratives, which validate their perception of the world or cause fear, urgency or curiosity. This is why AI-driven threats can create personalized cognitive malware, which can cause attacks on everyone’s unique cognitive leverage.

Seeing this fusion of humans and machines is the key: you can not only protect the network, but also defend the narrative. This requires defense technology control, real-time behavioral analysis and customized training to keep the mind safe from deception.

Organizational control and friction

We often think that security control is a powerful obstacle that can prevent threats on its tracks. But when threats are subtle by human behavior, we need friction rather than force. Strategic friction involves adding micro-delays, reminders, or escalations in situations indicating risk behavior signals. For example, holding a suspicious email for further checking, or freezing the account for a brief cooldown after several failed login attempts. Such a nudge won’t stop productivity – they recommend safer options without disrupting workflows and jeopardizing user dissatisfaction.

Cases of AI Security and Human Supervision

Organizations have great variability in their needs for automation. Some people are eager for one-click solutions that run end-to-end to produce neat reports with zero-person touch. Others, especially multinational corporations operating in regulated industries, require humanity at every key point. Both approaches have their benefits, but there are similar problems in our ability to keep humans in the cycle. As the response window shrinks, the decision loop must be accelerated or broken.

History provides warning stories. In an early self-driving car incident, a trained system to identify pedestrians and bicycles failed to identify bicycles traveling by travelers, respectively, because the model was not trained for such a coupling scheme. This triggered analytical paralysis, sadly leading to death. In terms of cybersecurity, a similar situation would be a new polymorphic malware or zero-day attack that can slide past detection tools. Without an integrated safety valve, such as a means of pause, sandboxing, or rolling backwards, you might cause damage before humans even know something is wrong.

Organizations can manage this by building a multi-layer control valve using soft pauses, which allows automatic alerts with human-approved options, hard pauses that ensure complete sandboxing and containment until security engineers review it and immediately close the proxy workflow at pre-determined threat thresholds. This tiered safety net ensures you remain agile without sacrificing supervision.

In short, safety awareness may trigger insight, but behavior shapes the outcome. If we adopt human risk management, guide decision making and design systems that embed safety valves, we build defensive capabilities that reflect reality. In doing so, we transform people from perceived weaknesses to the strongest ally in the ever-evolving security stack.