For decades, cybersecurity has operated on an assumption that the human is the weakest link. That phishing, social engineering, impersonation, urgency, authority, fear are all affective tactics that work because they are engineered against how human cognition functions, not just against technical systems. Today, AI has made it all kind of worse.

The cognitive exploitation toolkit that attackers have always relied on has been automated, personalised, and deployed at a speed, accuracy and volume that is increasingly undetectable by both human judgement and technical systems. Additionally, security products increasingly use AI to make decisions on behalf of users. The problem is we offload judgement to AI, users stop developing threat intuition and become quite dependent. This talk asks: is AI reshaping how users perceive risk and is the human still the weakest link today?

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Amel Bourdoucen

Dr. Amel Bourdoucen is a cybersecurity and human-centered technology researcher at F-Secure specializing in user security behavior, mobile privacy and app ecosystems, and digital wellbeing and online safety. Her work bridges academia and industry, examining how security and privacy challenges emerge in real-world digital environments — from mobile ecosystems and manipulative game mechanics to family-oriented sharing technologies. Her work has been published in leading academic venues and featured in international media, contributing to both industry practice and human-centered cybersecurity research.