The Good Tech Companies - Genuine Users Aren’t Always Human — And That Shouldn’t Scare You

Episode Date: June 17, 2025

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/genuine-users-arent-always-human-and-that-shouldnt-scare-you. Not all genuine users are human. Learn why trusted automation deserves a place in your systems — and how to build security that recognizes intent, not identity. Check more stories related to cybersecurity at: https://hackernoon.com/c/cybersecurity. You can also check exclusive content about #trusted-automation, #bot-detection, #intent-based-security, #api-security, #genuine-users, #automated-workflows, #human-vs.-bot, #good-company, and more. This story was written by: @lightyearstrategies. Learn more about this writer by checking @lightyearstrategies's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Many genuine users online aren't human — they're trusted software agents. Traditional security models fail them by misclassifying helpful automation as threats. Deck advocates for intent-based trust frameworks to support both humans and bots, reducing risk, churn, and failure while boosting resilience and scale.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Genuine users aren't always human, and that shouldn't scare you, by lightier strategies. Rethinking who, or what, we trust online, the internet was built on the assumption that humans are the only genuine users. It's baked into our authentication flows, our captures, our security heuristics, and even our language. We talk about users as people and bots as threats. But that assumption is breaking. Today, some of the most essential actors in software systems aren't human at all. They're agents, headless, automated, credentialed pieces of software that do everything from

retrieving payroll data to reconciling insurance claims to processing royalties at scale. They're deeply integrated into the services early on every day, and yet, many platforms treat them as intrusions. It's time to stop confusing automation with adversaries, says Laurent Lavelle, community manager at DEC. Many of these bots aren't attackers. They're your customers' workflows, breaking silently because your system doesn't know how to trust them. They're your customers' workflows, breaking silently because your system doesn't know how to trust them. The legacy of human-centric trust models. Security teams have long relied on a binary heuristic, humans are good, machines are a bad. This led to a proliferation of CAPTCHAs, bot filters, rate limiters, and user agent sniffers

that make no distinction between adversarial automation and productive agents. These models worked for a time, but the modern internet runs on APIs, scheduled jobs, and serverless triggers. Internal agents and external integrations behave just like bots, because they are. They log in, request data, act predictably, and don't click around like a human would. And that's the point. What we're seeing now is that the same heuristics designed to keep bad actors out are breaking legitimate use cases inside," says Y.G. LeBuff, co-founder of DEC. That includes everything from from airline rewards to health insurance providers. A better definition of, genuine. So how do you distinguish between harmful bots and helpful ones? DEC proposes a shift. From human-first models to intent-first frameworks.

Genuine users are not defined by their biology but by their behavior. A genuine user is, authenticated, they're who they claim to be. Permissioned, they're accessing what they're supposed to. Purposeful, their actions are consistent with a known and allowed use case. Consider a scheduled agent that pulls expense data from 150 employee accounts at the end of each month. It's credentialed, scoped, and auditable, but most systems flag it as suspicious simply because it logs in too fast or accesses too much.

Meanwhile, a real human could engage in erratic or malicious activity that flees under the radar simply because they're using a browser. This is a flawed paradigm. We need to flip it. The hidden costs of getting it wrong. Misclassifying agents as threats doesn't just lead to bad UX. It introduces risk. Product failure. Automated flows break silently. Payroll doesn't run. Reports aren't filed. Data is lost. Customer churn. Users blame the product, not the security rules. Support tickets spike, engineering dead. Developers are forced to create ad hoc exceptions.

Fragility creeps in, security blind spots. Exceptions weaken systems, opening up paths for actual abuse. At DEC, one client had built a multi-step claim appeals workflow that relied on an internal agent syncing EOB data nightly. When their legacy security provider began rate-limiting the agent, it created a cascade of downstream failures. It took weeks to diagnose. Designing for hybrid identity, modern systems need to accommodate both humans and non-humans

in their trust models. Here's what that looks like. Separate credentials. Don't reuse human tokens for agents. Use scoped service accounts. Intent-aware raid limits. Expect agents to move fast and operate 24-7. Throttle by roll, not raw volume. Auditability. Agents should log their actions. Create structured telemetry pipelines, life cycle management, track agent ownership, rotate secrets, and deprecate outdated processes. Behavioral baselines. Monitor what normal looks like for each identity. Flag anomalies, not automation. A cultural shift in security.

Security isn't just about saying, no, it's about enabling systems to work as intended, safely. The teams that win aren't the ones with the most rigid defenses, says Levele. They're the ones who design infrastructure that understands the difference between risk and friction. This means, shifting from gatekeeping to enablement. Replacing blunt detection rules with contextual analysis. Building not just for prevention, but for resilience. Don't fear the agents, learn from them, not every user is human. That's not a threat, it's a reality, and increasingly, it's an opportunity. By recognizing and

respecting automation as part of the user base, we unlock better reliability, faster scale, and stronger systems. The company's that embrace this shift will outbuild the ones that resisted. It's time we stop asking, is this a bot? And start asking, is this trusted? Thank you for listening to this Hacker Noon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit HackerNoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.