Human Risk Management: 6 Ways to Protect Your Organization
Human risk management is critical to your organization’s security. Today’s digital landscape is scary, and most business owners are intimidated by the overwhelming number of cybersecurity solutions and vendors that promise to help keep them secure. While many solutions offer value, most overlook a critical vulnerability that accounts for almost 90% of cyber-attacks: human error. Human risk, stemming from employee actions and behaviours, is the most critical area of vulnerability businesses must address today. Human risk refers to the potential for individuals within an organization to compromise cybersecurity through their actions, whether intentional or unintentional. Unlike most technical risks, human risk is particularly dangerous because:
- It’s pervasive: Every employee, from entry-level to C-suite, is a potential weak point.
- It’s dynamic: Human behaviour is complex and can change rapidly, making it difficult to predict and control.
- It’s exploitable: Cybercriminals increasingly target human vulnerabilities through social engineering tactics.
- It’s costly: The latest IBM report found that the cost of the average data breach hit a record high of USD 4.88 million in 2024, not to mention significant reputational damage.
Most Common Human Risk Factors
Several core factors contribute most to human risk within organizations:
- Lack of Awareness: Many employees don’t understand good cybersecurity hygiene and its importance, nor do they recognize potential threats
- Carelessness: Many employees take shortcuts or ignore cybersecurity best practices
- Social Engineering: Sophisticated phishing attacks and other manipulation techniques are constantly evolving and can fool even vigilant employees
- Insider Threats: Disgruntled or malicious employees may intentionally compromise security
Strategies to Mitigate Human Risk
Human risk is a complex and multifaceted set of vulnerabilities that requires a truly comprehensive approach for effective mitigation. Several critical approaches are required to minimize human risk, and they must all be simultaneously deployed to enact tangible results.
1. Human Risk Monitoring
Deploy a solution that monitors and evaluates the various metrics of human behaviour so you can effectively determine which of your employees carries the highest levels of risk and in which particular areas. Human risk monitoring should include phishing simulations, password audits, policy compliance, and security awareness quiz scoring.
2. Individualized Tailored Training Programs
Through effective human risk monitoring, you should deploy an individualized security training protocol that can target each employee’s specific weaknesses and increase cybersecurity competency in those areas. This training program should be continuous and engaging, using real examples and simulated security events to best prepare them for actual attacks used by today’s cybercriminals. Additionally, gamifying the training program and incentivizing quantifiable improvement can improve training efficacy. Top 5 Free Cybersecurity Awareness Training Resources for 2025
3. Foster a Culture of Cybersecurity
Implement comprehensive cybersecurity that promotes a unified cybersecurity culture across your entire operational infrastructure. Ideally, the solution you move forward with should be transparent and clearly communicate security concerns. Additionally, it should recognize and reward good security practices. This can be done by gamifying cybersecurity across the organization and incentivizing the consistent improvement and hardening of the entire workforce. How to Build a Cybersecurity Culture in Your Organization
4. Identify Misconfigurations
While technology alone can’t solve human risk, it can help minimize your organization’s overall attack surface. Be sure to deploy a solution that interconnects the full gambit of technology. Consider solutions that flag misconfigurations and vulnerable defaults and automatically assigns the corrective actions to the right people.
5. Enforce and Comply with a Secure Compliance Framework
Deploy a cybersecurity solution that allows for the comprehensive implementation of clear policies and procedures in accordance with secure compliance frameworks such as SOC 2, CyberSecure Canada (CSC), or ISO27001. Not only do these provide the strict enforcement of cybersecurity best practices, but they also guarantee behavioral and operational procedures that are often prerequisites to operating in many sensitive and restricted markets.
6. Prioritize Human Risk Management
Many companies allocate significant portions of their IT budget to cybersecurity but fail to address their most significant vulnerability – their workforce. You must treat human risk with the same seriousness as all other cybersecurity threats. Be sure to allocate sufficient resources to a solution that can effectively identify and remedy human risk. Ideally, human risk considerations should be interconnected with your entire cybersecurity strategy, with continuous and quantifiable human risk monitoring that can be properly reduced over time. Human risk is the most significant and most underestimated threat to an organization’s cybersecurity. By acknowledging this vulnerability and taking effective action against it, companies can significantly enhance their overall security posture. Effective human risk management is not a one-time effort, it is an ongoing process that must be built out and interconnected within your entire cybersecurity infrastructure.
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Additional Resources
- Managing Human Risk Requires More Than Awareness Training (ISACA.org)
- Almost 90% of Cyber Attacks are Caused by Human Error or Behavior
- Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 (IBM)
Managing Human Risk Requires More Than Awareness Training (ISACA.org) Almost 90% of Cyber Attacks are Caused by Human Error or Behavior Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 (IBM)
