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How Does Human Error Relate to Security Risks in Cybersecurity?
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Understanding how human error relates to security risks starts with a simple truth: attackers often gain access by convincing people to let them in. A phishing email, fake invoice, or convincing phone call can provide an attacker with the access they seek. These are not rare events. They are everyday mistakes made by overworked, distracted, or busy employees.
That’s why the human element continues to feature in so many breaches. According to Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, 62% of data breaches involved the human element, including social engineering, credential misuse, phishing, and errors.
Organizations need a structured approach to identify, measure, and reduce these risks through human risk management programs.
What Is the Connection Between Human Error and Security Threats?
Imagine a finance manager at the end of the day who receives a call from the CFO. The request is simple: authorize a vendor payment before the close of business. The voice is familiar, the project is real, and the deadline is reasonable. The payment goes through.
Later, the company discovers that the call was generated using AI voice cloning. Nothing was hacked. All security software worked as expected. The attacker only convinced someone to make a normal business decision.
That’s how attacks work today: attackers target people who are busy, distracted, or under pressure. A single mistake can bypass years of security measures.
For more on how organizations can prepare employees for AI-driven voice attacks, see Threatcop’s AI-powered vishing simulation.
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Where Human Error Creates Risk
Phishing and Social Engineering Attacks
Phishing remains a common method for accessing an organization. Clicking a fake login screen or opening a legitimate-looking email can reveal credentials or install malware.
Attackers have become much better at making these messages appear legitimate. They research their targets, mimic internal communication styles, and create a sense of urgency that prompts quick decisions. Regular security awareness training helps employees recognize these tactics before they escalate into actual security incidents.
Everyday Mistakes
Not all incidents are sophisticated attacks. There are also cases where an employee uses the same password across multiple accounts. A sensitive file is shared with the wrong person. A cloud folder is available to anyone with the link.
When considered individually, these actions may appear insignificant. But they offer an attacker exactly what they need: a way to move deeper into the environment.
Attacks Beyond Email
Email is not the only medium to consider. Employees are receiving business requests through Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, SMS, and phone. QR codes are used in offices, events, and shared workspaces. The attackers are not just going after the inbox; they’ve diversified their methods.
Security awareness must be in step with people’s ways of working now, rather than five years ago.
Why Organizations Should Not Rely Only on Traditional Awareness Training
Many organizations still rely on periodic phishing campaigns alongside their annual security awareness sessions. These programs are useful for compliance, but they do not focus on behavior change.
Learning happens through repetition. Cybersecurity is no different. Employees who regularly practice spotting suspicious emails, messages, and phone calls are more likely to recognize real attacks. People who attend training once a year often forget what they learned before the next training session.
The goal is not to judge staff for errors but to give them enough practice to recognize suspicious activity and make it routine.
Identifying and Measuring Human Risk Instead of Guessing
Security teams have dashboards available for endpoints, networks, and cloud infrastructure. However, measuring employee risk has been more difficult in the past.
Without meaningful data, it’s hard to answer simple questions. Which department would be most likely to fall victim to invoice fraud? Are executives more at risk for Business Email Compromise (BEC)? In the past six months, has awareness training actually reduced risk?
Click-through rates alone are not enough to answer those questions. Continuous measurement is needed to understand how employees respond to various attack channels.
How Threatcop Helps
Threatcop takes a different approach through a continuous human risk management model consisting of four stages: Assess, Aware, Protect, and Empower.
Assess
Threatcop Security Awareness Training (TSAT) conducts simulations across email, SMS, WhatsApp, QR codes, and AI-generated voice attacks. The results are combined into an Employee Vulnerability Score (EVS) that provides a measurable view of human risk at the business unit level for security teams.
Aware
Staff who interact with simulated attacks receive targeted training to address the behavior that needs improvement. Learning is short, practical, and aligned with compliance standards such as GDPR, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.
Protect
By adding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC to email security, Threatcop’s TDMARC helps minimize the risk of successful domain spoofing and executive impersonation.
Empower
The Threatcop Incident Reporter (TPIR) lets employees report suspicious emails with a single click, enabling security teams to investigate threats before they spread.
Developing a Stronger Security Culture
Reducing human risk is not about blaming employees who make mistakes. It’s about understanding where those errors happen and changing behavior over time.
The first step in a practical approach is to conduct a baseline to better understand current behavior. Organizations can then train specifically, take technical steps such as implementing DMARC, and run regular simulations to measure progress.
Over time, reporting rates rise, risky behaviors decline, and security awareness becomes a year-round event. It becomes an ongoing habit.
“When employees are engaged in defense rather than treated as a liability, a people security management approach makes the entire organization more resilient.”
Conclusion
Human error will always be a part of cybersecurity because every organization relies on people to make decisions. The goal is not to eliminate all errors. It’s to ensure that a single error doesn’t escalate into a major security incident.
When considering how human error relates to security risks in your organization, begin by quantifying the human layer alongside your technical security measures. The knowledge gained often uncovers gaps that technology alone cannot identify.
By providing a way to measure and track security improvements, Threatcop helps organizations make informed decisions to improve employee security awareness and continuously reduce human risk.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is human error still a major cybersecurity risk?
Employees operate at speed and make hundreds of decisions every day. Attackers create messages that rely on trust, urgency, and normal business processes, leaving even experienced users vulnerable.
Can organizations minimize human cyber risk?
Yes. Employees can become better prepared for modern attacks through regular simulations, targeted awareness training, and continuous measurement that helps improve security behavior over time.
What metrics should security teams track?
In addition to phishing click rates, organizations should monitor reporting rates, repeat offenders, response times, and other human risk metrics such as the Employee Vulnerability Score (EVS).
Purva is a Technical Content Strategist at Threatcop with an MBA in Business Analytics, specializing in SEO-driven content and technical editing across IT and digital domains, and is the author of the book From a Daughter’s Eye.
