Red Hot Cyber
Cybersecurity is about sharing. Recognize the risk, combat it, share your experiences, and encourage others to do better than you.
Fabrizio Saviano : 5 December 2025 07:40
Personal growth manuals sell hyperfocus as the secret to success. Routines as the key to productivity. Stepping out of your comfort zone as a universal panacea.
But Jeff Bezos ( ADHD ), Elon Musk ( Asperger’s ) and Richard Branson ( dyslexic ) didn’t discover hyperfocus by reading a self-help book: they were born with it.
Thomas Edison was obsessive and unable to concentrate on a single task for long, yet he invented the light bulb. Leonardo da Vinci left works unfinished because his mind was racing in too many directions. Einstein learned to read, write, and speak late. Today, they would probably all be diagnosed as neurodivergent. And the world would consider them “problematic.”
The point is that we call a different modulation of intelligence a “disorder,” a “syndrome,” or a “disease.” ADHD isn’t just distraction: it’s also extreme multitasking. Autism isn’t just social withdrawal: it’s also profound systems thinking. Dyslexia isn’t just a reading deficit: it’s also a talent for unconventional innovation.
And it’s not just an impression: several neuroscientific studies confirm the link between some forms of neurodivergence and the ability to solve problems creatively, see patterns invisible to others, and resist manipulations that work on the majority of people.
These aren’t manufacturing errors: they’re evolutionary variations. Yet we continue to build educational programs, digital platforms, security systems, and processes based on a unified model. We force different brains to imitate models that don’t belong to them… and then we’re surprised when they fail or are manipulated.
Society treats people like animals to be trained with standardized rewards (bonuses, gamification, promotions) and punishments (firings and reprimands). But digital platforms have figured it all out: they design algorithms that maximize your engagement by exploiting your specific cognitive differences precisely.
Platforms like Google, TikTok, and ChatGPT don’t treat you like an average user: they profile you, infer your cognitive functioning, and provide you with stimuli tailored to your personal vulnerabilities. And if you’re neurodivergent, for them, you’re not a problematic or disturbed user: you’re a high-value user, because your behavior is more predictable.
An ADHD brain reacts more intensely to constantly novel stimuli: TikTok is designed for exactly this. An autistic brain seeks pattern and consistency: recommendation algorithms exploit this very characteristic. A dyslexic brain favors visual information: Instagram and Pinterest know this very well.
But there’s a flipside. The same characteristics that make neurodivergents vulnerable to some manipulations also make them immune to others.
Autism naturally filters out many social engineering techniques based on immediate emotion. ADHD resists manipulations that require sustained sequential attention. Dyslexia enhances visual pattern recognition and reduces the effectiveness of linguistic framing.
A cybersecurity team with neurodivergent members sees vulnerabilities that a homogeneous team ignores. This is because they look at the system from different angles, ask “odd” questions, and notice inconsistencies that others might dismiss as irrelevant.
The problem is that selection, training, and employment processes are designed for “standard” brains that in reality represent only a minority of the real population.
According to European data, only 30% of autistic adults have stable employment, despite many of them having high qualifications. STEM graduates with ADHD or dyslexia have higher-than-average unemployment rates, not due to a lack of skills but rather to inadequate recruiting processes.
Italy ranks last among EU countries for basic digital skills: only 45% of Italians possess them according to the DESI 2025 index. And the percentage drops further if we look at the employment inclusion of neurodivergent people.
It’s not just an ethical issue. It’s an economic and national security issue. We’re wasting talent that could make a difference in cyber defense, technological innovation, and organizational resilience.
Cybersecurity must stop treating the human factor as a variable to be standardized. People are not average users: they are distinct cognitive ecosystems, each with specific vulnerabilities and strengths.
Traditional security awareness training consistently fails 15-20% of employees. It’s not because they’re stupid or inattentive, but because their brains work differently and no one has designed content specifically for them.
Cognitive diversity isn’t a CSR quota to fill: it’s a competitive advantage to protect and develop. But only if processes are designed for people’s actual brains, not for an ideal brain that exists only in textbooks.
If you want to learn more about how to transform neurodivergence from a perceived vulnerability to a strategic cybersecurity resource, the book CYBERCOGNITIVISM 2.0 – Manipulation, Persuasion and Digital Defense (coming soon to Amazon) dedicates an entire section to the analysis of specific cognitive vulnerabilities and proposes operational models for cognitively inclusive security awareness.
Fabrizio Saviano