Despite billions invested in cybersecurity platforms, organizations continue to experience devastating breaches. Most successful breaches and internal threats share one common element: people. Yet legacy security solutions stubbornly focus on managing credentials rather than understanding human behavior. This approach treats symptoms while ignoring the underlying condition.
Organizations relying solely on credential management are essentially gambling with their security posture. The inherent problems with password-based security create multiple attack vectors that cybercriminals exploit daily.
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At the same time, when humans are incorporated into the security process, it is to add steps in the authentication process. In other words, to add friction. Instead of creating a more secure environment, friction increases the likelihood of ignored security processes or the creation of clever workarounds.
The Password Problem: From Security Tool to Attack Vector
Password-based authentication suffers from fundamental human and technical limitations that make it unsuitable for modern security needs:
Human Behavior Creates Predictable Vulnerabilities: Users consistently choose weak, easily guessable passwords, or reuse the same credentials across multiple platforms. Despite decades of security awareness training, password123, company names with years, and simple keyboard patterns remain among the most common choices. When breached credentials from one service are exposed, they often unlock access to numerous other accounts.
Scale Makes Brute Force Inevitable: The massive brute force campaign from January to February 2025 demonstrated this reality, targeting 2.8 million IP addresses daily with automated login attempts. Credentials of major security vendors, including Palo Alto Networks and SonicWall, were targets of these attacks. The combination of AI, modern computing power and cloud resources makes it economically viable for attackers to attempt millions of password combinations against thousands of targets simultaneously.
Password Management Creates New Attack Surfaces: While password managers solve some reuse problems, they become high-value targets themselves. A successful attack on a password manager can provide criminals with keys to an organization’s entire digital operations. At the same time, it is not uncommon for users to write down and store their long, complex passwords in unsecured locations, or share them inappropriately.
Credential Stuffing Exploits Systemic Weaknesses: Attackers regularly use databases of stolen credentials to gain unauthorized access across multiple services. With billions of compromised credentials available on dark web markets, credential stuffing attacks have become automated and highly successful, often achieving success rates of 0.1% to 2%—seemingly low percentages that translate to thousands of successful breaches when applied at scale.
Social Engineering Bypasses Technical Controls: Passwords can be extracted through phishing, social engineering, or simple observation. No technical security measure can protect against users voluntarily providing their credentials to convincing attackers or typing passwords while being watched.
The Multi-Factor Authentication Mirage: While adding multi-factor authentication (MFA) to credentials represents an improvement over password-only systems, it introduces new vulnerabilities rather than solving fundamental problems. Cybercriminals have learned to exploit MFA systems, using stolen credentials to grant themselves expanded access and authorization. A critical flaw in the credential-plus-MFA model is that it verifies a device at a specific moment, not the person using that device.
The Modern Security Paradigm: Person-Centric Protection
Modern security architecture must include a fundamental shift from managing credentials to understanding people. Advanced machine learning and AI technologies now enable real-time, person-based behavioral modeling at enterprise scale—capabilities that were technologically impossible until now.
This approach leverages AI-enhanced behavioral analysis and advanced pattern matching to identify specific individuals, instead of simply anomalies. By incorporating human-centric signals, organizations can dramatically reduce false positive rates while enabling genuine real-time threat detection and response.
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The SOC Crisis: Drowning in Data, Starving for Intelligence
Cyber attacks unfold in minutes or seconds, while traditional incident response workflows require hours or days. This fundamental mismatch between attack speed and response capability creates a structural disadvantage that alerts alone cannot overcome. The most critical step in a SOC response is the ability to recognize that malicious activity has occurred or that a bad actor is within a system. Modern threats require real-time response capabilities that traditional SOC workflows cannot deliver. Ransomware can encrypt critical systems in under 10 minutes. Advanced persistent threats can exfiltrate sensitive data in hours.
The average SOC processes thousands of alerts daily, yet lacks the contextual information needed to prioritize threats accurately. Current alert systems typically rely on simple severity scoring based on technical indicators—high, medium, low classifications that tell SOC teams which alerts to investigate first, but not why those alerts matter to the business. Without understanding the person, the data, and the business context, SOC teams waste precious time investigating false positives while real threats go undetected. Too much noise in a SOC leads to burned out, frustrated teams without measurable security improvements.
The Path Forward: Real-Time Human Understanding
A core difference between modern security from legacy approaches is the ability to identify which specific person is engaged in malicious behavior as it happens. Real-time human understanding transforms cybersecurity from a reactive discipline into a proactive defense strategy that is able to halt initial malicious activity before significant damage is done.
As cyber threats continue evolving at automated speed, organizations must transition to detection and response approaches that are equally as fast and understand human behavior at an individual level. These solutions must also provide the necessary context to support security teams. This fundamental shift will enable organizations to be more secure, as well as more resilient.
