cognitive resilience TheABCof Protecting the human firewall against social engineering at scale I


n the modern threat landscape, the security perimeter has shifted. It no longer sits at the edge of the corporate network or the physical gates of a facility.


Increasingly, it resides within the psychological frameworks of the workforce. While traditional security focuses on protecting data and infrastructure, a newer category of threat, cognitive warfare, targets the mechanisms through which people perceive reality and make decisions.


For security, risk and resilience practitioners, particularly those operating within high-stakes regulated


environments, understanding this shift is not merely academic. It is an operational necessity.


To defend our organisations, we must engage with the core of social psychology: the ABC model of Affect, Behaviour and Cognition.


The battlefield of the mind: defining cognitive warfare


Cognitive warfare is the deliberate exploitation of psychological vulnerabilities to degrade an individual’s or group’s capacity for clear thinking. Unlike traditional propaganda, which seeks to change what people believe, cognitive warfare aims to change how they think. Its objectives are to erode institutional trust, foster internal division and undermine the collective sense-making required for coordinated action.


In a business context, this manifests as sophisticated disinformation campaigns, AI-enhanced social engineering (including deepfake-enabled fraud) and the weaponisation of internal cultural divisions to cultivate insider threats. As generative AI matures, the cost of producing


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convincing synthetic media has collapsed, making these attacks accessible to a far wider range of adversaries.


The ABC framework: how disruption occurs


Social psychology offers a well-established map of how adversaries can deconstruct internal resilience. By targeting the ABCs (Affect, Cognition and Behaviour), hostile actors can turn a unified workforce into a fragmented, reactive and vulnerable population.


1. Affect: The emotional trigger


Affect refers to our emotional state: feelings, moods and physiological responses. Cognitive warfare almost always begins here. Adversaries use emotionally charged content, amplified by algorithmic recommendation systems, to push targets into states of high arousal.


When people are angry, fearful, or highly anxious, what Kahneman terms “System 1” thinking, which is fast, intuitive and


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