Exploiting Human Nature: The Oldest Vulnerability in Cybersecurity

Do you know who you're shaking hands with?

Editor's (Andrew's) note: Renata recently joined us from the world of sales and marketing. We're really excited to have her onboard here at Stoic Cybersecurity. She is writing as someone who hasn't lived her whole life in cybersecurity (I was doing this before I was even out of high school). She is seeing cybersecurity from the inside for the first time.

Renata Glebocki is a marketing and operations strategist with a strong technical background, having built digital platforms across industries, from political campaigns to market research and startups. As the Founder & Creative Director of Carapace Strategies, she helps organizations strengthen sales pipelines, optimize digital presence, and drive growth. She currently brings her expertise in marketing, sales, and technical strategy to Stoic Cybersecurity, helping the company expand its client base and deliver trusted cybersecurity solutions.

Technology evolves. Human nature does not.For decades, organizations have invested billions in next-generation firewalls, endpoint detection, and cloud security platforms. Yet the single most exploited vector remains the same: people.

Cybercriminals do not break in through technological systems alone. They walk through the front door of trust, helpfulness, and urgency. The most advanced intrusion rarely begins with a technical exploit. It begins with an email, a phone call, or a favor.

The uncomfortable truth is that human behavior, not software, determines whether most attacks succeed…and awareness training isn’t going to save us.  The good news is that a disciplined approach to pressure management, process, and incentive management can.

Trust: The Default Setting

People assume good intent until proven otherwise. It is a social mechanism that enables business, collaboration, and society itself. It is also the foundation of most cyberattacks and fraud.

A well-crafted phishing email does not exploit a vulnerability in Outlook; it exploits the human desire to cooperate. The same instinct that builds teams and partnerships also allows adversaries to impersonate them.

Modern organizations preach Zero Trust in network design, but often abandon it in human interaction. Vendors are assumed legitimate. Colleagues are assumed to be honest. Internal requests are assumed to be valid.

Zero Trust, when properly applied, must extend beyond technology. It must govern relationships, processes, and vendor management alike. Verification is not cynicism or distrust; it is discipline.

Furthermore, many humans routinely confuse trusting a person they know and have every reason to trust, with trusting a machine which claims to be used by or acting on behalf of that person.  A request from Andrew’s account on some cloud service is inherently less trustworthy than something Andrew has said to me in person.  One of those was definitely Andrew, the other a machine claiming to act on Andrew’s behalf.  Unfortunately, most of our brains just abstract both to “Andrew said…”.  What about Andrew’s company email?  That’s arguably somewhere in the middle: at least I know Andrew is usually in control of that account. --Editor's note: This is rapidly getting worse. With the rise of AI, my voice can be faked, and video of me can be faked that is reasonably convincing over FaceTime or Zoom. I might not even be the editor, and you would never know.

Helpfulness: The Soft Edge of Social Engineering

In every successful social engineering attack, there is a victim trying to do the right thing. An employee answers an urgent email from “finance.” A manager approves a wire transfer to meet an imagined deadline. A vendor “just needs a quick password reset.” A market research client is faced with a deadline, and they may feel pressured to accept questionable data. 

Attackers rely on the psychology of helpfulness, the same trait companies celebrate in customer service and teamwork. When an organization rewards responsiveness without reinforcing verification, it conditions employees to act before confirming.

Good intentions, weaponized, become risk.

Fear and Urgency: Deadlines as Attack Vectors

Cybercriminals understand that time pressure erodes judgment. When someone believes a deadline, shipment, or client account is at risk, security becomes negotiable. Urgency short-circuits critical thinking.

This pattern extends from internal operations to external partnerships. A project manager rushing to deliver data may skip secondary review. A well-meaning contractor may bypass access controls "just this once." In both cases, urgency becomes the breach vector.

Speed is not a virtue when it undermines verification.

Survey Fraud: Social Engineering by Another Name

Not all social manipulation happens in inboxes. In market research and data collection, fraudsters exploit the same psychological blind spots. Organizations often assume that vendors are honest and that the data they provide is clean. This assumption could cost companies millions of dollars.

Bad actors aggregate without their client’s permission, or they fabricate survey data, inflating participation metrics and corrupting insights. Without a thorough technical review, including device analysis, IP tracking, or ID length verification, bad data is accepted into the final dataset. Do not rely on the vendor’s alleged methods for ensuring data integrity and participant validation–It is very easy to fabricate this.

Every data point should be treated as an interaction with potential risk. When fraud passes as feedback, strategic decisions are built on fiction. Trust without verification is data risk at scale.

Exploiting Human Nature

Cybercriminals do not need to outsmart machines; they only need to understand people. The manipulation is rarely technical. It is psychological.

Authority Bias: People follow instructions from perceived leaders, whether that authority comes from a title, a long tenure, or the approval of others. Due diligence must apply even to those with reputational capital.

The Halo Effect: Competence is assumed from confidence. A polished brand or articulate spokesperson can mask ethical failure. Great branding does not equal integrity. 

Reciprocity and Social Proof: We return favors and trust who and what others trust. Both instincts can be exploited. This is not ignorance. It is biology. The same human wiring that enables cooperation also allows exploitation. 

Turning Awareness into Governance

Awareness training alone cannot solve a problem rooted in instinct. The solution lies in governance: converting awareness into enforceable behavior. A mature security culture does not rely on employees to "be careful." It builds systems that make verification the default state.

Effective governance incorporates:

• Verification Protocols: Build Zero Trust principles into internal workflows and vendor access, not just network traffic.

• Pressure Management: Recognize urgency as a risk factor and design controls that resist impulsive action. Allow enough time to complete projects without cutting corners. Always assume the worst, and build time into the schedule to account for the worst-case scenario.

• Least Privilege: Create a system for managing privileges which ensures least privilege and prevents privileges from being retained as roles change.

• Data Integrity Audits: For research, analytics, or customer systems, verify the legitimacy of every input—from device usage, ID length, to submission timing.

• Defined Escalation Channels: Employees must know how to confirm authority and where to report suspicion without fear of reprisal. These channels should be baked into systems, like ERP, that they use every day. Too often, a lone data analyst leads the charge in identifying data anomalies, only to be met with pushback from vendors, coworkers, and clients. 

• Use the Tools Available: For online quantitative surveys, security is a must. Don’t rely on a vendor’s alleged security. Have your own tool in place and keep it on at all times.

Governance transforms security from a moral expectation into an operational standard.

Discipline Over Instinct

Technology cannot compensate for misplaced trust. Every firewall, endpoint, and encrypted tunnel depends on human behavior to function correctly. Cybercriminals know this better than anyone.

The path to resilience begins not with software, but with discipline and process. Trust, helpfulness, and urgency are not weaknesses. They are strengths that must be governed. At Stoic Cybersecurity, we believe discipline is the truest form of defense. Because in cybersecurity, human nature is the oldest vulnerability and the hardest to patch.