Cybersecurity leaders have spent the past decade modernizing defenses around networks, endpoints, and cloud infrastructure, yet many of the most damaging breaches continue to begin with an old-fashioned weakness: human behavior. A recent Globes article, “A human answer to human cyber risk,” argues that the industry is moving toward a more pragmatic acknowledgement of that reality, shifting from purely technical controls and one-off awareness campaigns to closer management of the actions and privileges that make employees and contractors an attractive target.
The premise is straightforward. Attackers typically do not need to defeat sophisticated encryption or break through hardened perimeter systems if they can persuade someone to click, share credentials, approve a fraudulent payment, or mis-handle sensitive data. The risks span classic phishing and business email compromise, but also include subtler patterns: workers reusing passwords, over-permissioned accounts, rushed approvals in finance workflows, and habitual workarounds that bypass policy in order to meet deadlines. Globes’ reporting frames the challenge as less about blaming employees and more about recognizing that most organizations have built an uneven security model, investing heavily in technology while leaving the “people layer” comparatively unmanaged.
That imbalance is now drawing attention not only from chief information security officers but also from executives and boards facing tighter regulatory expectations and a steady rise in breach costs. Ransomware groups, state-linked operators, and financially motivated fraudsters have converged on the same playbook: exploit trust, exploit fatigue, and exploit complexity. As organizations have adopted multifactor authentication and improved technical monitoring, criminals have adapted by targeting help desks, impersonating vendors, and manipulating internal processes that are harder to protect with standard tools.
The Globes article points to an emerging category of solutions and services designed to reduce human cyber risk in a more continuous, measurable way. Instead of settling for annual compliance training and generic phishing simulations, the approach emphasizes identifying which roles carry the most exposure, which individuals are most likely to be targeted, and which workflows create openings for error or manipulation. In practice, this can mean more targeted coaching for high-risk groups, better controls around sensitive actions, and refined access management that limits the damage when credentials are compromised.
The shift also reflects a broader rethinking of what “security culture” means. Historically, culture initiatives have relied on messaging and periodic training modules, often delivered uniformly across the workforce. But uniformity may be the problem: a software engineer, a payroll administrator, and an executive assistant face different threats and make different security-relevant decisions throughout the day. A more modern model borrows from risk management disciplines: segmenting populations, assessing exposure, and allocating resources where they reduce the most risk. That kind of prioritization is particularly attractive in a market where security teams are under staffing pressure, and where the volume of alerts can overwhelm even mature organizations.
At the same time, the move toward deeper measurement of employee behavior raises questions about privacy, labor relations, and trust. Continuous evaluation of security-related actions can be valuable for identifying risky patterns, but it can also feel intrusive if it is not transparently governed. Large organizations in regulated sectors already monitor certain activities for compliance reasons; extending that monitoring in the name of cyber risk can blur lines. The balance will likely depend on clear policies, limited and proportional data collection, and a focus on support rather than punishment. The most credible programs tend to emphasize “safe defaults” and friction reduction—making the secure way the easiest way, rather than relying on fear-based messaging.
Technology and training are also not substitutes for fixing broken processes. Many successful social-engineering attacks exploit rushed approval chains, ambiguous ownership of vendor management, or informal practices around urgent payments. Strengthening verification steps for financial transfers, tightening supplier onboarding, and reducing standing privileges can have outsized impact. In that sense, the “human answer” described by Globes is as much about operational discipline as it is about software.
The renewed emphasis on the human layer arrives as organizations contend with hybrid work, the proliferation of collaboration tools, and an increasingly complex identity landscape. Employees move between personal and corporate devices, communicate across multiple channels, and regularly interact with third parties, creating more opportunities for impersonation and data leakage. Security teams have responded by hardening identity systems and integrating monitoring across platforms, but those steps do not eliminate the need for reliable user decisions at key moments. The question is whether organizations can systematically improve the odds of those decisions being correct.
Globes’ “A human answer to human cyber risk” captures the mood of an industry that is becoming more candid about the limits of purely technical defenses. Attackers are persistent, creative, and organized, but they are also pragmatic: they will keep choosing the simplest route in. For many companies, that route still runs through the inbox, the help desk, and the everyday shortcuts of busy staff. The next phase of cybersecurity, as the article suggests, may hinge less on another breakthrough tool and more on building organizations where the human layer is treated as a core part of the defensive architecture—measured, supported, and engineered for resilience.
