Cybersecurity and privacy best practices are not just technical because people and processes play a huge role in security as well. One of the biggest examples is the South Korean credit bureau theft, where an outsourced IT consultant made a mistake that led to a massive data breach impacting roughly 100 million people. This happened because he copied highly sensitive personal data from three separate credit card companies onto an external USB drive. He was not stopped due to poor data handling oversight and weak internal processes.

Another major example was the 2024 Google AI trade secret theft committed by a Chinese national and former Google software engineer. He copied over 500 confidential files containing Google’s proprietary supercomputing data center architecture and AI designs into his personal notes before transferring them to a personal cloud storage account while hiding his activities from Google’s data loss prevention systems. This resulted in years of Google AI research and trade secrets being compromised, which eventually led to charges from the U.S. Department of Justice.

It is true that technology itself can sometimes have vulnerabilities that cybersecurity professionals may miss. However, human mistakes and poor processes can often play an even more devastating role in creating security risks and exposing sensitive information.