Should humans disappear from the cybersecurity chain? How our role in Cybersecurity is changing.
By Peter Vandeput, Business Unit Lead Cybersecurity at Inetum Belgium
In the third quarter of 2025, Check Point Research recorded an average of 1,249 cyberattacks per Belgian organization per week—nearly double the figure from five years earlier. At the same time, attacks are becoming faster and more complex, and are increasingly driven by generative and agentic AI. This evolution is putting pressure on traditional security teams, which still make many decisions manually today. The question, therefore, is not whether AI will play a role in cybersecurity, but how the human role will evolve in an increasingly fast and automated environment.
Belgian organizations are increasingly in the crosshairs of hackers. According to Microsoft, no less than 5% of all Russian cyberattacks detected in 2025 were aimed at Belgium, with recent incidents affecting organizations such as Proximus, Scarlet, and Ghent University Hospital (UZ Gent). Problems are not limited to our borders either. Take the recent theft at the Louvre, where the password for the camera security system turned out to be simply “Louvre.” The thieves walked in and out without any digital resistance, an example of how basic mistakes can have major consequences.
Meanwhile, the nature of cyberattacks is changing rapidly. Where phishing once played the leading role, we now see an organized criminal ecosystem built around ransomware-as-a-service and AI-driven malware. In September, Anthropic claimed to have been the victim of the first reported cyberattack fully orchestrated by AI. Hackers allegedly used its chatbot Claude to carry out automated attacks against 30 organizations worldwide.
As the complexity and volume of attacks increase, so does the pressure on security teams. This raises an important question: are humans still fast and alert enough to keep up with these attacks?
Attacks are evolving faster and smarter than our response
The reality is that both attackers and defenders are using AI, but criminals often adopt it faster. They use AI to build attacks at lightning speed and constantly modify them. As soon as a security system recognizes one pattern, their software generates new variants within seconds that evade detection. The attack continuously changes shape, forcing analysts to process a flood of signals. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually assess every suspicious element or accurately judge its risk.
Today, many AI-driven solutions already exist that can autonomously respond to clear cyber threats or attacks. In complex situations, however, a security professional still decides when to intervene. As AI continues to advance, attacks are evolving at a pace that manual checks and interventions can no longer keep up with. The risk grows that an analyst may detect an attack but be unable to respond quickly enough to limit the damage. Has the human become too slow for modern cyberattacks? Possibly. Does that mean humans should disappear from the cybersecurity chain? No, quite the opposite.
Which tasks will disappear, and which will emerge?
A large part of today’s security work is still spent on repetitive tasks: triaging alerts, searching log files, running scripts, and following up on notifications. Much of this can be automated perfectly well, and in many cases already is, through EDR, XDR, and NDR solutions. The use of (agentic) AI will only accelerate this automation. Security professionals will be able to work more efficiently and focus on more complex and strategic tasks. It is not the job that disappears, but the operational work.
The real shift lies in what security professionals will do next. Just as software developers have moved in recent years from pure coding toward architecture and design, cybersecurity is evolving toward strategy, prevention, risk management, and oversight. Security professionals are moving into roles where they decide which tasks to automate, supervise AI systems, assess risks such as bias, and intervene when human judgment and nuance remain essential. Today’s analyst does not become obsolete; instead, they become tomorrow’s architect.
Toward a future-proof security team
This shift in responsibilities is not a distant future scenario. Security teams that continue to operate as they do today risk falling behind. That is why organizations must start preparing their teams now for new AI technologies and emerging threats. Security professionals need to adapt to roles in which they execute less themselves and focus more on designing, assessing, and steering. This requires continuous and targeted training, automation where it makes sense, and a clear strategy in which humans and AI reinforce each other. Only then can organizations build digital resilience that grows alongside the speed and complexity of modern cyber threats.
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