Humanix has announced a capability to identify live violations of organization-defined procedures governing IT support workflows. Designed to prevent unauthorized access, these procedures typically require help desk and service desk agents to follow identity verification steps before fulfilling sensitive requests, such as credential resets. Attackers have learned that pressuring agents to bypass these safeguards is among the fastest paths to a breach.
“People staffing help desks and service desks are placed in an impossible position. They’re expected to always be helpful, yet somehow avoid aiding potential attackers,” said Keith Stewart, CEO of Humanix.
“We built Humanix because those people deserve better. Humanix exists to help cyber teams and help desk agents detect when someone is trying to manipulate an agent. We’ve extended that detection to also include efforts to bypass an organization’s policies and procedures governing sensitive business transactions,” Stewart continued.
Cyber attackers are increasingly targeting the people behind the help desk
Social engineering is now an industrialized threat vector, with 76% of modern breaches targeting humans. High-profile campaigns from groups like Scattered Spider demonstrate how vishing and other interactive tactics are exploiting support and service personnel as a path into the enterprise. Yet, too many organizations fail to treat this attack class as a detection and response problem, instead blaming the victim and forcing more training that does not work.
Established procedures easily break down under pressure when attackers create high-stakes, artificial crises. This results in a critical control gap, with human vulnerability enabling the bypass of the entire security stack.
Humanix intervenes before procedural failures become breaches
Humanix is closing that gap. Its detection and response platform covers the voice, chat, email, and ticket interactions where these human-centered attacks happen. Using conversational AI, it identifies impersonation attempts, detects manipulation tactics, and now flags when an agent is coerced into violating their organization’s established procedures before access changes hands.
Consider a common scenario: an attacker calls the help desk posing as a new contractor starting that morning. She claims her manager is unreachable, she has a client presentation in an hour, and she needs system access immediately.
Recognizing the urgency, the agent agrees to skip the multi-factor authentication steps required by his employer and asks the caller to stand by while he prepares her new credentials. That moment between the procedure being bypassed and access being granted is the last point at which the attack can be stopped before it becomes a breach – and Humanix flags it, live.
For organizations facing this threat at scale, Humanix provides:
- Visibility into critical human and AI agent interactions
- Continuous detection and response coverage for impersonation, manipulation, and organization-defined procedure violations
- Control of the human attack surface
