THE HUMAN FACTOR IN CORPORATE DATABASE SECURITY: A SOCIO-BEHAVIORAL RISK ANALYSIS

Abstract

The article highlights the socio-behavioral nature of risks in corporate database security, where the human factor is a determining contributor to incidents. It is shown that behavioral errors, knowledge gaps, stress and demotivation generate vulnerabilities that circumvent formal policies and technical controls. The roles of the employee as operator and decision-maker are outlined. Misconfigured access rights, negligent execution of procedures, delays in anomaly detection and errors in interpreting monitoring signals lead to data leaks and integrity violations. The impact of cognitive and information overload, heterogeneous competencies and low trust in digital solutions is examined, as factors that shift risk from a purely technical to a behavioral dimension. Scenarios of human participation as either victim or offender are identified, namely social engineering, malicious insiders and workaround practices. Case studies (Capital One, Uber and SingHealth) demonstrate how configuration errors, excessive privileges, shared accounts, the absence of MFA and non-compliance with procedures escalate local deviations into large-scale compromises. Technical manifestations of unintentional actions in databases are described: incorrect ACLs, erroneous access rules, incomplete parameter validation and undetected SQL injection. It is shown that, for insider threats, effective measures include personalized warnings and behavioral analytics with risk indices integrated with DLP policies and access restrictions. A countermeasure framework is considered: the principle of least privilege and defence-in-depth (including Zero Trust), continuous IAM/API monitoring, regular search for misconfigurations, segmentation and privileged account control, as well as targeted training with incident simulations and feedback. It is concluded that the resilience of data storage systems is determined not only by technologies, but also by the controllability of personnel behavior.