On International Women in Cyber Day, a quiet but powerful shift in how organizations approach digital security found voice in a conversation between two leaders in the field. Anna Collard, Senior Vice President for Content Strategy at KnowBe4 Africa, spoke with Inda Sahota of Fresenius Group’s Cyber Culture and Training division, highlighting a theme that rarely takes center stage in cybersecurity: the role of human values in protecting against digital threats.
For Sahota, cybersecurity is not merely a technical discipline of passwords, policies, and patches. It is a human-centred practice rooted in critical thinking, empathy, and resilience. Her outlook has been shaped as much by her professional career as by her upbringing in the United Kingdom, the daughter of first-generation Punjabi Indian immigrants who encouraged agency and self-awareness from an early age. That foundation now informs her work at Fresenius, where she advocates for values-based training alongside traditional security awareness programs.
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From Rules to Resilience
Standard corporate training often emphasizes prohibitions: don’t click suspicious links, don’t share passwords, don’t trust unknown senders. But Sahota argues that such lists rarely prepare employees for the psychological manipulation at the heart of phishing or social engineering attacks. Instead, she points to research on self-efficacy, the belief in one’s ability to respond effectively to challenges, as a stronger predictor of safe online behaviour.
Her approach prioritizes building agency and mindfulness: the ability to pause before responding to digital demands, to recognize emotional manipulation, and to remain present despite the distractions of modern media. Studies suggest that media multitasking, now a daily norm, erodes attention and heightens susceptibility to cyber risks. For Sahota, resilience means teaching people to adapt fluidly, not react impulsively.
Habits of Digital Mindfulness
Embedding these principles requires more than awareness campaigns. Habits must be designed deliberately: encouraging short pauses before clicking, modelling mindful technology use, or creating emotionally safe environments where employees can question suspicious messages without fear of judgment. Sahota likens this to cognitive scaffolding, guiding individuals to build their own critical thinking frameworks rather than dictating rigid rules.
Her message reframes cybersecurity as a profoundly human endeavour. “We need to bring the human back into the being,” she says, underscoring that the most effective defence may not come from firewalls or algorithms, but from cultivating presence, self-awareness, and emotional resilience in an environment engineered to exploit attention.