Human Error

Human error is inevitable. Secure-by-design systems are built to account for that.

When a security failure is blamed on "human error," the real question is: why did the system make the unsafe choice easy and the safe choice hard?

When a system fails because of an innocent mistake, it was designed that way. It is brittle by design.

Human error should be treated as the immediate cause of an incident, never its conclusion.

Discussion prompts

• Where in your product does a single customer mistake create a security weakness?
• What secure-by-default choices in the developer environment could remove the human error risk entirely?
• How does your code review process catch security-relevant human errors? What is the feedback loop to make those errors less likely?