In the 1980s, a small device called The Clapper promised to simplify life. With two claps of your hands, your living room lights would flick on or off, no switches, no effort, pure convenience. It was the dawn of hands-free automation, long before “smart homes” or “IoT” entered our vocabulary.
Fast forward four decades, and we now live in a world where automation runs everything, from our homes to our critical infrastructure. Yet, as the cybersecurity landscape grows more complex, convenience still comes at a cost.
The Clapper was revolutionary because it made technology feel personal and effortless. But it also symbolized something deeper: a willingness to trade control for convenience. That trade-off hasn’t gone away; it has simply scaled.
Today’s “digital clappers”, AI-driven automation, cloud integrations, IoT devices, and self-learning security tools, make operations faster, but they also create new blind spots. Each time we integrate an automated trigger, we open a potential gateway for abuse, misconfiguration, or exploitation.
Cyber attackers love convenience as much as we do — especially when it belongs to someone else.
Automation in cybersecurity is essential — no human can manually monitor or respond to the volume of modern alerts. But “set it and forget it” thinking can turn tools into liabilities.
Consider:
Ransomware attacks exploiting automated system privileges or cloud syncs.
Phishing simulations triggering automatic password resets, confusing employees.
AI-based tools that detect threats but also learn from false positives, creating new patterns of bias.
When systems are designed to respond instantly, a single false signal can cascade into a real incident.
What The Clapper lacked, and what cybersecurity often risks losing; is context. A pair of claps could mean “turn on the lights”… or applause at a good joke. The device couldn’t tell the difference.
Similarly, automated cybersecurity systems still struggle with nuance. They react, but they don’t yet reason. That’s why the human in the loop remains the most important safeguard in any security operation.
True resilience lies in human-guided automation: systems that enhance judgment, not replace it.
The lesson from The Clapper era isn’t to reject automation, it’s to respect it. Every convenience feature, from a one-click login to AI-based incident response, needs intentional design, monitoring, and human oversight. Automation should amplify awareness, not replace it.
As we build smarter defenses, let’s remember that simplicity is powerful — but only when it’s safe.
Otherwise, all it takes is one well-timed “clap” to turn off the lights.