Normalcy bias is a significant cognitive trap in cybersecurity where organizations underestimate the likelihood of disasters because life appears to continue as normal. This bias often leads businesses to interpret a lack of clear alerts as evidence of safety, resulting in a dangerous failure to act on warning signs. The NCSC Annual Review 2025 highlights this reality, reporting a 130% increase in significant cyberattacks, suggesting that many organizations are falling into a state of complacency even as the threat landscape escalates.
To combat this, organizations must move beyond the reactive "lessons learnt" narrative and adopt a proactive stance through continuous auditing and advanced security services. By investing in penetration testing, threat intelligence, and 24/7 Managed Detection and Response (MDR), companies can close the gap between perceived security and reality. Failing to do so essentially outsources security assurance to cybercriminals, who are increasingly using AI to scale their attacks and exploit the very normalcy bias that keeps organizations vulnerable.
