Welcome to Cybersecurity Awareness Month! We’re super excited, as there’s a ton of cool stuff going on in the cybersecurity world right now. For us, this month is a great chance to take stock of the current state of the cybersecurity industry and to take a look at what the future holds – both in terms of dangers and potential solutions and innovations. We’ll be featuring a number of blogs and whitepapers this month, all aimed at giving you the most accurate picture possible of what’s going on in cybersecurity today.

Here’s a big one: the growing trend of hackers targeting humans instead of systems.

One of the most serious issues facing organizations and cybersecurity professionals is the shifting of threat surfaces away from systems and infrastructure and toward human-targeting cyberattacks.  For decades, we’ve had our eyes trained on the traditional attack surface – servers, websites, office computers, physical assets. But now, the target is no longer just conventional assets but, also, people.

This human attack surface, mirroring its traditional counterpart, is fragile and complex. Employee business emails, third-party vendors, end-user accounts, employee assets and actions, and even their personal websites and identities – all these are facets. The human attack surface also includes fourth- and fifth-party vendors, shadow IT, and end user accounts. It’s this attack surface that hackers target and exploit the most, with devastating consequences.

The stakes are high: business email compromise, third-party data breaches, end-user account takeover, advanced persistent threats, transaction fraud, personal website data breaches, and personal identity exposure are some of the consequences. Primarily, hackers are using human victims to gain the PII they need to access organizations.

So, how do we combat these threats? The answer lies in Human-Centric Threat Intelligence. By monitoring security events impacting your business, third parties, and employees (both at home and at work), your business can effectively anticipate and respond to a torrent of data breaches, data leaks, and planned attacks.

If you’re unfamiliar with Human-Centric Threat Intelligence, you’re not alone. The majority of the threat intelligence industry is still entangled in the cobwebs of stolen passwords and traditional threats. However, the growing threats to the human attack surface demand a fresh approach, enriched with PII, human metadata, and real-time dark web intel. Our CEO explored the concept at BlackHat 2023.

The human threat surface is still in the process of coming into focus. Hackers are deploying AI-assisted social engineering attacks to target individuals with growing success. Everything is becoming more digitized and people are living more and more of their lives online. That means larger exposure for individuals and more opportunities for hackers.

For security teams struggling to mitigate cyber attacks against people, HackNotice is the only human centric threat intelligence platform uncovering the human attack surface. Unlike typical threat intelligence services, HackNotice’s real-time, comprehensive intelligence on the business, its vendors, and its employees, enables security teams to develop rapid and thorough incident response programs. With HackNotice, threats are easy to identify, inventory and understand so security teams can focus on what’s important: minimizing the human attack surface.