Flooding the Zone: Emotional Hijack, AI Bias & Critical Thinking in Cybersecurity

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Presented at OrangeCon 2025 by

An Gaiser

In an era of information warfare, social engineering is no longer limited to isolated phishing emails. It’s about overwhelming minds. From misinformation to algorithmic overload, cyber professionals today face a new form of threat: emotional hijack. In this session, former intelligence officer and behavioral analyst An Gaiser unpacks how this invisible attack vector works, and how it hijacks more than just attention. Using real-world examples from counter-terrorism, security screening, and AI-driven profiling systems, An reveals how "flooding the zone" disables our critical thinking and activates deep behavioral responses (fight, flight, freeze, affiliate). We will explore how this impacts decision-making in cybersecurity teams, especially in moments of ambiguity or pressure. This talk challenges common assumptions in the security field, including outdated emotion recognition models still used in AI tools, and offers a grounded framework for detecting, interpreting, and de-escalating emotional flooding, both in ourselves and others. Expect a mix of behavioral science, real-world intelligence cases, and practical takeaways you can use in your daily work. Whether you're a red teamer probing human error, a blue teamer navigating stress signals, or a leader seeking clarity in chaos: this session will give you a new lens to detect the invisible and stay cognitively sharp under pressure.