Day 6 of 12 days of riskmas (or, if you prefer, risk-mukah or the non-denominational risk-ivus)
The TL;DR
- Human risk isn’t uniform across your organization
- Aggregate metrics hide where risk is concentrated
- Cohort-based analysis unveils risk in groups, like role, access, or behavior
- This analysis helps you target and reduce risk more efficiently
Human risk isn’t evenly distributed across your organization. Different roles, access levels, and behavior patterns matter to how people interact with security controls and threats. Treating employees as a monolith can mask meaningful differences in exposure and behavior, making it harder to target interventions where they are most needed.
Cohort-based analysis addresses this gap by grouping employees based on shared characteristics such as function, department, geography, tenure, system access or privileges, or observed behaviors. These cohorts provide a clearer lens for evaluating campaign performance and understanding where interventions are working, where they are stalling, and where you have concentrated risk.
By slicing performance data by cohort, security teams can move beyond aggregate metrics and identify patterns that would otherwise be hidden. For example, a phishing campaign may appear effective at the organizational level while performing poorly within a specific group. In this simple sample analysis, a VIP cohort clicked on phishing messages at more than twice the rate of other functional groups, highlighting a risk concentration that would have been easy to miss in overall results.
This level of insight lets you take more precise action. Instead of broad, one-size-fits-all follow-ups, security teams can tailor training, reinforcement, and controls to the cohorts that need them most. As human risk programs mature, cohort-based analysis becomes essential for prioritization, precision, and meaningful risk reduction.
Check us out tomorrow for a look at behavior decay (it’s not as gruesome as it sounds!).
