Boards, C-suite leaders, and founders can’t depend on the protection of their organization’s IT and security teams anymore. Truthfully, they never could, but now it’s getting really personal. Their public visibility has placed them directly in the crosshairs for threat actors using social engineering. Threat management once meant securing servers and networks, but the modern threat landscape has shifted dramatically. Instead of attacking the company itself, threat actors are breaking in through the people who run it. An executive’s digital footprint (LinkedIn profile, interviews on YouTube, Facebook vacation photos, etc.) has become part of the corporate attack surface. And adversaries are becoming really good at exploiting it with very little overhead.
Executives have always been high-value targets (spear phishing, whaling), but in the age of AI they’re front and center like never before. Criminals know that senior leaders get exceptions, have authority, access, and influence, and often operate outside the traditional guardrails that protect standard users. Busy, high-profile people tend to blend personal and professional activities across the same devices and networks, like emailing on their phone or working from a personal computer instead of the managed assets from IT. This isn’t something IT can enforce most of the time, but it means executives are uniquely vulnerable. Increasingly, attackers skip the work email and instead focus on personal email accounts, cell phones, and social media, knowing that a compromise at home can lead directly to a compromise at the office.
This shift extends far beyond the executives themselves, too. The personal lives of their families have now become part of our threat modeling. Social media posts from spouses, children, and even extended relatives provide a wealth of intel (OSINT) for anyone who knows how to look. A teenager’s TikTok video might reveal their habits or location. A spouse’s photo at the airport might signal the perfect timing for a fraudulent wire transfer request. Families often post innocently, but those posts have tons of metadata becoming breadcrumbs. Threat actors have learned that while executives may undergo security training, their families rarely do. Compromising the people around a leader has become just as effective as compromising the leader directly.
Open-source intelligence, or OSINT, has amplified this risk dramatically. The amount of publicly available information about any of us is just scary. LinkedIn resumes, corporate bios, conference appearances, real estate listings, data broker sites, news stories, breach data, and even casual posts from friends can be woven together into a disturbingly accurate profile. Attackers use these details to craft social engineering attacks so personalized impossible to fake. With the help of AI, they mimic writing style, exploit known travel schedules, reference real colleagues, and cite real business initiatives. What once required trained experts can now be done over a VPN, on a RaspberryPi, in an afternoon, by an attacker with little language or technical skills.
The most recent evolution is the rise of deepfake-driven social engineering. Deepfakes have moved from low-quality novelty and to the go-to cheap tool of choice for many cybercriminals. With less than a minute of public audio, attackers can now clone an executive’s voice convincingly enough to place live phone calls that sound indistinguishable from the real person. With a few photos pulled from social media, they can generate realistic video clips of an executive giving “instructions” to staff. With agentic bots now capable of have full conversations, we have to rethink security awareness training completely. The line between reality and impersonation is now dangerously thin.
All of this is to say: protecting an executive is no longer as simple as protecting a device or an inbox. Modern threat management requires acknowledging that leaders themselves (and their families and personal lives) are the new perimeter we must monitor, protect, and remediate. That means executives must adopt stronger digital hygiene practices that extend beyond the office. Their personal accounts need multi-factor authentication. Their personal devices must be secured with enterprise protections. They need to understand how their social media presence contributes to their attack surface, and they must exercise greater discretion about what is shared publicly. From the organization’s perspective, SOCs need to monitor data broker sites like they monitor the darkweb and social networks like their wireless networks. We need to be ready to limit (and curate) digital footprints just like we limit our traditional attack surfaces.
But the responsibility does not end with the executives themselves. Families must be brought into the conversation. Many security breaches begin not with the leader but with a spouse whose email privacy settings were lax or a family member whose device compromise led to an attack on the executive. Providing household-level cyber safety education is becoming an essential part of protecting the organization. Companies should implement proactive OSINT monitoring to track data exposure related to their leadership teams, keeping an eye out for personal information, compromised credentials, and potential risks from data brokers especially.
Deepfake threats require their own defensive strategies. Leaders and their teams must develop verification methods that don’t rely solely on appearance or voice—challenge phrases, known-only-to-the-team authentication steps, or secure communication pathways that are difficult for attackers to mimic. Employees should be trained to question even the most convincing audio or video instructions, especially when money or data is involved. The organization must treat deepfake risk as a standard component of business email compromise, not science fiction.
Threat actors are no longer going after infrastructure; they are going after identity. They are not exploiting ports, they’re exploiting people. And the more visible, influential, or successful the person, the greater the risk. Our success protecting an organization now begins with protecting the individuals who lead it. By embracing personal security education, reducing public data exposure, integrating family safeguards, monitoring digital footprints, and preparing for deepfakes, executives and boards can strengthen not only their own safety but the resilience of their entire organization and families.
The companies that will survive 2026 unscathed will be the ones whose leaders recognize that cybersecurity is no longer just a technical challenge. It is a personal one.