Why Human Error Is the Biggest Cybersecurity Risk and How Companies Can Prevent Breaches 

With cybercrime projected to cost businesses $10.5 trillion in 2026, human error remains one of the most overlooked vulnerabilities in any security strategy. Even with the strongest security perimeter, a simple, unavoidable mistake could make your company vulnerable to attack.

I spent years on the compliance and risk advisory and assessments side of our business, working PCI and related framework assessments. What I saw there, and what our assessors still see on every engagement, is that often it isn’t technical controls that fail. It’s a person making the hurried click or some other reasonable-looking decision on a busy Tuesday.

Whether it’s writing down passwords, sending documents to the wrong person, or forgetting to lock screens or physical premises, human error can give bad actors golden opportunities to wreak havoc.

With at least 60% of all data breaches involving some form of human element, now is the time to start prioritizing training and awareness, and to learn how leadership can help reduce human risk.

Why Human Risk Has Become a Business Risk

Phishing and social engineering (which both rely on the human element) are more prevalent and successful than ever with the finding that 8% of employees account for 80% of incidents. Ransomware is also now present in around 44% of all data breaches.

More precisely, human error boils down to skill lapses and faulty decisions. Even with the most proactive security perimeter, an employee making a lapse of judgment (e.g., accidentally sending a sensitive email to an unverified address) could still provide an inroad for devastating attacks.

However, despite concerning statistics, the human element continues to be a major headache for firms of all sizes. Variously, this is likely because:

• Firms are investing more in cybersecurity technology than employee training, assuming systems will take care of breach protection completely
• Employees lack basic cybersecurity and data protection training and awareness
• Attackers are increasingly targeting employees with phishing and social engineering in part thanks to increasing investments in AI cybersecurity (meaning that, while networks are more robust, the human factor is still wide open)

The Most Common Employee Actions That Lead to Breaches

Employees could, even unintentionally, cause data breaches by:

• Reusing the same passwords, failing to change them regularly, or ignoring password strength and entropy recommendations
• Mishandling data, such as accidentally sending emails to the wrong people, and granting data access to an unverified department
• Sharing passwords or allowing unverified people into secure areas
• Failing to lock device screens and/or physically secure premises where sensitive data is kept
• Falling for social engineering tricks and not recognizing red flags
• Following outdated practices and using legacy systems
• Failing to maintain systems properly, such as delaying or overlooking update requests

Of course, this doesn’t account for intentional employee actions that cause breaches, which adds to the human element statistic quoted earlier.

Regardless, there’s a clear theme here, and it is that even the most seasoned of experts in their fields can make mistakes – the crucial factor is cybersecurity training and vigilance. But why are human errors still so prevalent if firms are already taking steps to train their employees?

Why Traditional Security Training Fails to Change Behavior

A key factor in security training failing to reduce human errors is the idea that behavior isn’t being modified directly: it’s just knowledge being transferred.

Traditional security training often focuses on delivering information, rather than changing people’s behavior. For example, routine training may simply provide standard pamphlets, presentations, and exercises, succeeding only in presenting information, rather than ensuring employees both understand and take steps to adjust their behavior.

Studies have found that mandated training has no significant effect on how employees respond to phishing threats, regardless of when they are trained. This is a clear indication that one-size-fits-all training systems require complementary, hands-on modules.

The Role of Leadership in Reducing Human Risk

Human risk reduction relies on invested managers leading by example from the top down, by both implementing clear data protection policies and regularly measuring security understanding with individual staff.

Leaders who provide traditional training and who appear to prefer “checking boxes” over investing in people will never outpace the threat of human error. To protect against these risks, leaders must establish and maintain a culture of security awareness, regularly top up knowledge, and measure employee understanding through personal development.

Security- and employee-focused leaders help to improve businesses’ robustness against threats caused by human mistakes by encouraging personnel to change their behavior and practices.

It’s worth remembering that not all human error can be avoided, but with the right training and leadership support, risks can be mitigated. Most importantly, leaders must make it clear that they have a role and responsibility to play in managing security – everyone is in it together.

Practical Ways Organizations Can Reduce Human-Driven Breaches

From a practical perspective, here are a few ways companies can start to reduce human-driven breaches:

• Build clear, comprehensive cybersecurity policies that are easy to access and ensure they are updated regularly
• Set up regular governance to ensure that all staff comply with policies
• Schedule regular password, user profile, and access control reviews across the year
• Embed cybersecurity awareness checks into personal development plans and one-to-one coaching
• Deploy simulations to test employee knowledge and reactivity in safe scenarios
• Run random phishing email tests to measure employee actions, and build training schemes and one-to-one top-ups if there are gaps
• Provide an open-door system where employees can report breaches and mistakes without fear of being reprimanded
• Limit access to sensitive information only to those personnel with a clear need
• Enforce additional security safeguards that act as extra safety nets against human error, such as multi-factor authentication and automatic security updates
• Carefully monitor user behavior, such as login requests for specific systems, and take action if suspicious activity occurs

The precise steps needed for each individual company to reduce human errors will look different every time.

Reducing human-driven breaches takes shared responsibility where leaders apply the rules to their own behavior, and employees develop vigilance for the patterns attackers exploit. If you want to see where your own environment sits on that curve, the fastest way to find out is a targeted social engineering assessment. That’s one of the places where VikingCloud’s penetration testing teams recommend our clients spend their time, and the findings are often more specific, and more fixable, than anything an awareness program can surface on its own.