As artificial intelligence increasingly dominates both offensive and defensive cybersecurity, this special issue emphasizes the critical importance of maintaining human involvement in security systems and decisions. The issue addresses concerns about AI-driven threats such as sophisticated phishing attacks, deepfakes, and behavioral data exploitation, while acknowledging that defensive reliance on AI-based threat detection creates cognitive challenges for practitioners.
Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is presented as a design principle that ensures human participation in system training, decision-making, and error mitigation, recognizing that fully automated security systems may be restrictive or dangerous. The special issue calls for behavioral information security research that balances AI's growing role with sustained focus on human behavior, cognition, and motivation in secure systems, training, and technologies.