Secure your organization’s network against human errors

Key Takeaways

• Human error, including phishing susceptibility, credential reuse, misconfiguration, and social engineering, was a factor in 62 percent of breaches in the Verizon 2026 DBIR, up from 60 percent the year before.
• Security awareness training reduces risk but does not eliminate it; the controls that actually remove human choice from the security path (phishing-resistant MFA, passwordless authentication, automated key and certificate lifecycle management) close the gap that training alone leaves open.
• SSH keys and long-lived credentials are among the most exposed technologies because they rarely expire, are rarely owned by a single accountable person, and are easy to over-provision by accident.
• Least-privilege access, automated certificate renewal, and continuous, role-based training together form the practical remediation checklist most audit and compliance frameworks now expect.
• No control eliminates human error entirely; the goal is to shrink the blast radius of a single mistake, not to promise a mistake will never happen.

Published: June 2022. Updated: August 2026. Reviewed by Encryption Consulting’s security team.

Security budgets keep climbing and new detection tools keep shipping, yet the weakest point in most breach chains is still a person clicking, typing, or approving something they should not have. That is not a character flaw. It is what happens when systems are built to expect correct behavior from people every single time, and one lapse is all an attacker needs.

What Counts as “Human Error” in Cybersecurity?

Human error in cybersecurity means an unintentional action, or failure to act, by an authorized user that causes, spreads, or allows a security incident. It is distinct from malicious insider activity, where the person intends harm. Four categories account for most of it:

• Phishing susceptibility. Clicking a malicious link or attachment, or replying to a fraudulent request, after a message that impersonates a trusted sender.
• Credential reuse and weak passwords. Using the same password across services, or choosing a password an attacker or a cracking tool can guess quickly.
• Misconfiguration. Leaving a cloud storage bucket public, an SSH key without an expiration, or an access control overly permissive by default.
• Social engineering susceptibility. Being manipulated through psychological tactics, pretexting, baiting, or impersonation, into bypassing a control a person would otherwise follow.

Social engineering, specifically, is the umbrella term for attacks that manipulate people rather than exploit software. An attacker gathers information about a target, often from public social media profiles or prior breaches, then uses that information to appear trustworthy before asking for a password, a payment, or a click. Phishing is the most common delivery method: a fraudulent email, text, or call designed to trigger one of the actions above. Insider risk is a related but separate category that covers both a careless employee who makes an honest mistake and a malicious actor who deliberately misuses their access; the controls that address each differ, which is why treating “insider risk” as one problem is itself a common planning error. Security awareness training is the structured, recurring education program organizations run to reduce the first three categories, though as the sections below show, training alone has a ceiling.

How Big a Role Does Human Error Play in Data Breaches?

Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), published annually and built from tens of thousands of confirmed breaches contributed by organizations and incident response firms worldwide, is the most cited primary source for how breaches actually happen. The human element share has stayed high and moved upward:

• 2025 DBIR: the human element was a factor in 60 percent of breaches analyzed.
• 2026 DBIR: that figure rose to 62 percent of breaches, even as attackers leaned more heavily on exploiting unpatched vulnerabilities in edge devices and VPNs, a category that overtook stolen credentials as the single most common initial access vector for the first time.

That last point matters for how you read the trend. Human error is not losing ground to more sophisticated attacks; it is running alongside them. A misconfigured or unpatched system is itself frequently the result of a human decision (a patch deferred, an alert ignored, a change made without review), so the line between “human error” and “technical vulnerability” is thinner than the two categories suggest.

Which Technologies Are Most Exposed to Human-Error Risk?

Some systems concentrate human-error risk more than others because they depend on a person remembering to do something correctly, indefinitely, with no automated backstop.

• Password-based authentication. Every login screen that accepts a typed password is a surface where reuse, weak choices, and phishing all convert directly into account takeover.
• SSH keys. Unlike passwords, SSH keys typically never expire and are rarely tied to a single owner in a directory system, so a key generated years ago by an employee who has since left can remain valid and unmonitored.
• Cloud storage and collaboration tools. Sharing settings default to convenience over restriction in many platforms, and a single wrong click can expose a bucket or a document to the public internet.
• Email. Misdelivery, sending sensitive information to the wrong recipient because of an autocomplete error or a wrong “To” versus “Bcc” field, remains a recurring cause of confirmed data breaches in regulated industries.
• Certificate and key management processes handled manually. A certificate renewal tracked in a spreadsheet depends on someone remembering the date; missing it causes an outage, and rushing it under pressure increases the odds of a misconfiguration.

What Is the Impact of a Human-Error-Driven Security Incident?

The immediate impact depends on what the error exposed, but three consequences show up repeatedly across documented cases:

1. Unauthorized access. A phished credential or a leaked key gives an attacker a legitimate-looking foothold, which is harder to detect than malware because the activity looks like normal user behavior at first.
2. Data exposure or loss. Misdelivery, public misconfigurations, and successful phishing that harvests data directly all lead to the same downstream problem: information leaving the organization’s control, often with regulatory notification obligations attached.
3. Operational disruption. Ransomware delivered through a phishing click, or an outage caused by an expired certificate no one tracked, both interrupt business operations, and the cost of downtime frequently exceeds the cost of the original data exposure.

The compounding factor is time. Because human-error incidents often look like legitimate access at first, they tend to run longer before detection than incidents that trigger an obvious technical alert, which increases both the scope of what an attacker can reach and the eventual cost of the response.

How Do Security Teams Detect Human-Error-Driven Incidents?

Detection for this category relies less on signature-based tools and more on behavioral and process signals, because the underlying activity uses valid credentials or a valid configuration path.

• Anomalous login patterns. Impossible travel, logins at unusual hours, or authentication from a new device combined with a sensitive action are strong signals a credential was phished or reused.
• Data loss prevention (DLP) alerts. Rules that flag sensitive data leaving through email, upload, or a misconfigured share catch misdelivery and accidental exposure before it becomes public.
• Certificate and key inventory audits. Scanning for expired, soon-to-expire, or ownerless certificates and SSH keys surfaces the manual-tracking failures before they cause an outage or a stale credential someone forgot to revoke.
• Phishing simulation reporting rates. Tracking how many employees report a simulated phishing email, not just how many click it, is a leading indicator of whether awareness training is changing behavior or just being tolerated.
• Access review and entitlement audits. Periodic review of who has access to what, measured against the principle of least privilege, catches the accumulated over-provisioning that happens when access is granted quickly and revoked slowly.

What Is the Remediation Checklist for Reducing Human Error?

Training changes behavior for some people, some of the time. The controls below reduce how much a single lapse can cost by removing the decision from the person wherever possible.

1. Deploy phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA). Standard MFA that relies on a one-time code or a push notification can still be phished or fatigued into approval. Phishing-resistant methods, such as FIDO2/WebAuthn security keys or certificate-based authentication, cryptographically bind the login to the legitimate site and cannot be relayed by an attacker.
2. Move toward passwordless or certificate-based authentication. Replacing passwords with a device-bound certificate removes credential reuse and password-guessing from the threat model entirely, because there is no shared secret for an attacker to phish or crack.
3. Enforce least-privilege access. Default to denying access, then grant the minimum permissions a role needs, reviewed on a fixed schedule rather than left to accumulate. Zero Trust principles, verifying every access request rather than trusting it by network location, apply directly here.
4. Automate SSH key and certificate lifecycle management. Replace manually tracked, never-expiring keys and spreadsheet-based certificate renewal with a platform that issues, rotates, and revokes credentials on a schedule, so a missed reminder cannot become a live vulnerability.
5. Run continuous, role-based security awareness training. An annual compliance video changes little. Short, frequent training tied to the specific risks a role actually faces, paired with regular phishing simulations, measurably improves reporting rates over time.
6. Add data loss prevention controls to email and file sharing. Automated checks that flag or block sensitive data leaving through the wrong channel catch misdelivery before it becomes a breach.
7. Build detection as the backstop, not the first line. Assume some errors will get through the controls above, and invest in the anomaly detection and audit practices described in the previous section so an error is caught in hours, not months.

Which Technical Control Best Offsets Each Human-Error Category?

Human-Error Category	Typical Example	Technical Control That Reduces Reliance on Vigilance
Phishing susceptibility	Clicking a malicious link or approving a fraudulent MFA push	Phishing-resistant MFA (FIDO2/WebAuthn, certificate-based authentication)
Credential reuse and weak passwords	Same password reused across personal and work accounts	Passwordless or certificate-based authentication, enforced password manager policy
Misconfiguration	Publicly exposed storage bucket or overly permissive access grant	Least-privilege access controls, automated configuration audits
Misdelivery and data mishandling	Sensitive data sent to the wrong recipient	Data loss prevention (DLP) tooling, encryption in transit and at rest
Social engineering (pretexting, baiting, impersonation)	Scammer impersonates IT support or a vendor to extract credentials	Verified out-of-band confirmation workflows, continuous security awareness training
Unmanaged or never-expiring credentials	SSH key or certificate no one remembers to rotate or revoke	Automated key and certificate lifecycle management

What Are the Limitations of Human-Error Reduction Programs?

No combination of training and technical controls reduces human error to zero, and treating any single figure, including the 62 percent DBIR statistic cited throughout this article, as a precise measurement of your own environment overstates what the data supports. A few limitations worth naming directly:

• DBIR figures are aggregated across a large, voluntary sample of contributing organizations; they describe an industry-wide pattern, not a prediction for any specific company.
• Phishing-resistant MFA and passwordless authentication remove password-related risk but do not remove every social engineering vector; an attacker who convinces a help desk to reset a factor in person, for example, bypasses the technical control entirely.
• Automated key and certificate lifecycle tools reduce manual tracking failures but still depend on correct initial configuration and scope; a poorly scoped automation can propagate a mistake faster than a manual process would have.
• Training improves reporting and awareness metrics, but published research on awareness programs shows the effect varies significantly by organization, role, and how the training is delivered; it is a risk-reduction layer, not a guarantee.

Update Log

This article was first published in June 2022 and substantially updated in August 2026. The August 2026 update added current Verizon DBIR statistics (2025 and 2026 editions), a technology exposure and impact assessment section, a detection-actions section, a numbered remediation checklist mapped to specific technical controls, a human-error-to-control decision table, a limitations section, an FAQ section with matching structured data, and refreshed internal links to Encryption Consulting’s current authentication and key management resources. Outdated framing (unattributed statistics, a single blanket “95 percent” figure) was replaced with sourced, dated figures.

What Would Encryption Consulting Recommend?

Most organizations already run security awareness training. Far fewer have removed the password as the primary point of failure, which is the single change with the largest measurable effect on phishing and credential-reuse risk. Our recommendation, in order:

1. Start with the credential, not the person. Move privileged and, over time, all user authentication to certificate-based, passwordless login with CertSecure Manager, so there is no password left for an employee to reuse or an attacker to phish.
2. Bring SSH keys under the same discipline. Static, never-expiring SSH keys are one of the most common ways a years-old human decision turns into a live exposure. SSH Secure automates key issuance, rotation, and revocation so ownership and expiration are enforced rather than tracked in a spreadsheet.
3. Build the certificate infrastructure to support both, at scale, without adding operational burden to your team. PKI-as-a-Service gives you managed public key infrastructure so certificate-based authentication and automated key lifecycle management are achievable without standing up and staffing a private CA from scratch.
4. Keep training running, but treat it as one layer among several, not the whole program.

Encryption Consulting is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified and SOC 2 compliant, and our advisory team has designed authentication and key management programs for organizations across regulated industries. If you want a second opinion on where your program currently stands, that assessment itself is a useful first step before any tooling change.

Conclusion

Human error is not going away, and no training program will make it go away. What has changed since this article first ran in 2022 is how much of that risk can now be engineered out of the system rather than trained out of the person. Certificate-based authentication removes the password an attacker can phish. Automated key and certificate lifecycle management removes the manual step someone forgets. Least-privilege access limits how far a single mistake can reach. None of that eliminates human error, but together, it shrinks the number of moments where one person’s bad day becomes the whole organization’s breach.

Related reading: Why Is Data Loss Prevention Essential, and How Does It Benefit Your Organization?, Strengthen Your MFA with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), Why Never-Expiring SSH Keys Are a Security Risk, and What Is Zero Trust Security?

Frequently Asked Questions

What percentage of data breaches involve human error?
The Verizon 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report found the human element was a factor in 62 percent of breaches, up from 60 percent in the 2025 report. This includes phishing, credential misuse, misconfiguration, and error, alongside breaches driven primarily by exploited technical vulnerabilities.

Is security awareness training enough to stop human-error breaches?
No. Training measurably improves phishing reporting rates and general awareness, but it does not remove the underlying risk that a person can be deceived under pressure. Pairing training with technical controls that remove the decision from the person, such as phishing-resistant MFA and passwordless authentication, closes the gap training alone leaves open.

What is phishing-resistant MFA and why does it matter more than standard MFA?
Phishing-resistant MFA, such as FIDO2/WebAuthn security keys or certificate-based authentication, cryptographically ties the login attempt to the legitimate site, so a phished credential cannot be replayed elsewhere. Standard MFA methods like one-time codes and push notifications can still be phished through real-time relay attacks or approved accidentally through push fatigue.

How does passwordless authentication reduce human error risk?
Passwordless authentication replaces a typed, shared secret with a device-bound cryptographic key or certificate. Because there is no password to reuse, guess, or phish, entire categories of human error (weak passwords, password reuse, credential phishing) are removed from the threat model rather than mitigated after the fact.

What is the difference between human error and insider threat?
Human error is unintentional: an employee makes a mistake with no intent to cause harm. Insider threat, in its malicious form, involves a person deliberately misusing legitimate access. Both fall under the broader term insider risk, but they require different controls: human error is best addressed with training and technical guardrails, while malicious insider activity requires monitoring, access review, and separation of duties.

References

• Verizon, “2026 Data Breach Investigations Report,” https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/dbir/
• Verizon, “2025 Data Breach Investigations Report,” https://www.verizon.com/business/resources/reports/2025-dbir-data-breach-investigations-report.pdf