If Darth Vader and the rest of the Empire made one major strategic mistake, it was failing to understand the important role that the human element plays in security. Convinced of their superiority, the Empire’s leaders assumed that the Death Star was impenetrable. However, in the end, it was a scientist and his team who compromised the technology by building in a backdoor. Despite the Death Star’s technical capabilities, the human element enabled the Rebellion to find the hidden weakness and destroy the technology.
In today’s business world, organizations are often convinced that their security technology stack enables them to mitigate risk appropriately. However, cybercriminals recognize that the human element, whether malicious or not, is the key to finding hidden weaknesses and gaining unauthorized access to systems. While information security professionals agree that mitigating risk requires a combination of people, processes, and technologies, they often still define the “people” in that equation as “security analysts.” As cyber attacks increasingly target the everyday employee, focusing on the human element and implementing a people centric security strategy becomes more important.
As cyber threats evolve to target the human element, organizations need to adopt a people-centric cybersecurity strategy that understands human behavior and implements user-friendly security technologies.
What is People-Centric Cybersecurity?
People-centric security, also called human-centric cybersecurity, is a strategic philosophy that reframes the security program to focus on the individual. By viewing users as active participants, this security approach seeks to reduce issues that often force people to create workarounds, integrating cybersecurity into daily workflows. Built on the following three pillars, people-centric cybersecurity moves beyond rigid controls and empowers employees by understanding how human behavior reinforces a resilient security culture.
Education and Awareness
A people-centric security program starts with an informed workforce engaging in effective education. Rather than the compliance-mandated training, effective education ensures that every employee understands their role in mitigating cyber threat risks. By creating a security culture that continuously engages people in relevant training, the organization can implement behavioral change.
User-Centric Technology
With human-centric security, technologies make cybersecurity easier for users. When organizations have security controls that consider human factors, employees are less likely to look for ways to bypass the protections. For example, cumbersome security systems that make accessing resources time-consuming are more likely to have people share passwords. By designing security measures around how people actually work, the organization reduces difficult to identify risks.
Behavioral Analytics and User Monitoring
Security teams need baselines that understand the way people normally interact with systems and networks. Behavioral analytics analyze these activities so that security teams can detect anomalies that might indicate a potential compromised account, insider threat, or ongoing cyber attack. By understanding the context about how people use systems, the security team can more easily differentiate between legitimate work and malicious activity.
What Are the Benefits of Human-Centered Security?
A people-centric approach enables organizations to strengthen their security posture and improve resilience against evolving cyber threats.
Mitigating Human Element Security Risks
The 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that the human element related to approximately 60% of data breaches, further noting the following:
- 32% of human element breaches related to credential abuse.
- 23% of human element breaches related to social actions.
- 14% of human element breaches related to errors.
7% of human element breaches were from interacting with malware.
By empowering employees with information and user-friendly security solutions, organizations create a sense of accountability that makes people more likely to follow security practices.
Improved Resilience to Insider Risk
Whether malicious or accidental, organizations struggle with insider risks. While malicious insider threats typically arise from disgruntled employees or contractors, accidental insider threats can be as simple as accidentally emailing a document to the wrong person. A people-centric security program that combines education with the appropriate security solutions, takes a dual approach to mitigating risk. Establishing and explaining security policies identifies expected, normal behavior. Adding technologies, like data loss prevention tools, provides another layer of security to mitigate risk.
More Efficient Incident Response
Taking a people-centric approach to security includes identifying Very Attacked Persons (VAPs). Attackers target the people who are most likely to respond to phishing emails and other social engineering campaigns. When security teams take a person-centric approach to risk modeling, they can more efficiently focus their investigations around the people and accounts potentially linked to an alert.
Augment Security Staff Capabilities
Many security teams remain understaffed. By focusing on VAPs, the overwhelmed security team can allocate its limited time and resources more effectively. By prioritizing alerts based on user and asset risk scores, the team can improve overall security effectiveness.
Why Do Organizations Struggle to Implement Human-Centric Security Strategies?
A people-centric security strategy is more than adding a new technology to the stack. The process requires a fundamental mind shift around how the organization approaches cybersecurity.
Lack of Clear Communication
CISOs and their security teams need to coordinate more effectively. While CISOs often focus on explaining strategic objectives to the senior leadership team and board of directors, they may not be giving the security operations center (SOC) the same level of clarity. The SOC needs to know why monitoring VAPs is different from privileged access management (PAM) and how both are necessary.
Lack of Appropriate Metrics
When organizations move toward a people-centric security strategy, their traditional metrics around training collapse. Most compliance reporting is a simple collection of completed assessments that achieve a pre-defined score. However, these fail to track behavioral changes, like reduced phishing clicks or increased employee-provided incident reports.
Resistance to Change
People are used to the boring, easy-to-complete standard annual awareness training that remains disconnected from daily activities. However, a people-centric approach requires them to adopt new behaviors, like reporting phishing or following more stringent access policies. Employees who view these new practices as barriers to productivity are more likely to look for workarounds or resist change.
Graylog Security: Enabling a VAP-focused, People-Centric Security Strategy
Graylog Security enables security teams to identify and protect their VAPs by incorporating the monitoring into their daily detection and response workflows. Graylog ties together threat intelligence, anomaly detection, and asset data enrichment to give SOCs and CISOs real-time, contextualized views of their VAPs to improve their overall security posture. With our VAP dashboard, security teams have a people-first view of attacks, enabling them to understand risk in human terms.
With Graylog Security, organizations can build a VAP-focused detection and response strategy that connects the dots between data, alerts, and people, enabling a proactive threat detection and incident response strategy that mitigate human element risks.
To see how Graylog can help you improve your security program and help you manage APTs more effectively, contact us today.
