An executive’s personal life is often the path of least resistance into a company. Their vulnerability isn’t driven by negligence, but by the way personal and professional digital lives increasingly overlap. Executive devices are often used across home and work environments, personal accounts lack enterprise-grade protections, and consumer IoT ecosystems introduce weak points that fall outside corporate control. That combination creates natural pivot paths attackers can exploit to move from personal exposure into the organisation.
This combination makes them high-value targets that traditional security controls were never designed to handle.
In 2026, the three top risks threatening the privacy, finances, and reputations of executives continue to be: deepfakes that make impersonation believable at scale, data brokers that supply attackers with personal information, and home networks that sit outside corporate control but contribute to the enterprise attack surface.
These are risks that personal cybersecurity providers like BlackCloak are already successfully fighting for organizations throughout the U.S.
Why Executives Are Now the Fastest Growing Attack Surface
The sad reality is that executive cyber risk has become normal, not exceptional. GetApp’s 2024 Executive Cybersecurity Report found that 72 per cent of U.S. cybersecurity professionals say senior executives have been targeted in the past 18 months. That's not a niche threat model. That's a routine operating condition.
Now layer in the wider environment. Rubrik’s State of Data Security 2025 report found that 90 per cent of organisations experienced cyber attacks in the past year. When attacks are that frequent, adversaries will keep prioritising the targets that offer the highest return.
Executives offer that return for three reasons:
- Visibility: Their names, roles, schedules, networks, and affiliations are easy to map. Even the most secure organisations struggle to control the sheer volume of executive exposure across social platforms, public filings, conference sites, partner pages, and media coverage. Attackers don't need to break in to gather context. They can simply collect it.
- Blended environments: Oftentimes for busy corporate leaders, sensitive decisions are made from hotels, airports, cars, home offices, and shared household networks. The modern executive’s digital footprint is a trail across corporate and personal systems that rarely share the same controls.
- Privileged access: Compromising one senior leader can lead directly to the enterprise. Bad actors can use this access to inflict reputational damage and leverage internal teams. That's why executive cyber risk is not just a personal issue. It's an enterprise risk multiplier.
Deepfakes Are the New Executive Impersonation Pipeline
Deepfakes have shifted executive targeting from “convincing one person” to “manufactured trust on demand”. The impact is already measurable.
The Ponemon–BlackCloak “Digital Executive Protection Research Report 2025” found deepfake attacks on executives increased from 34 per cent in 2023 to 41 per cent in 2025. GetApp’s 2024 research adds another signal, reporting that 27 per cent of attacks against executives involve AI-assisted deepfakes.
A convincing voice memo to a finance lead. A short video clip to a comms team. An urgent virtual meeting regarding sensitive company information. A “quick check” on a payment, a contract, a supplier change, or an urgent board matter. Deepfakes work because they are so realistic, difficult to spot, and therefore, compress doubt. The organisational risk is amplified when a fake message that mentions the right family detail, the right travel schedule, the right internal initiative, or the right tone because they become increasingly more difficult to identify. This makes them potentially more damaging than a technically sophisticated attack. It's social engineering with a credibility layer.
Deepfakes will become increasingly easier to generate, quicker to iterate, and more tailored to the target’s patterns as the year progresses, transforming executive impersonation into a repeatable pipeline rather than a one-off trick.
CISOs need to arm their executives with the common strategies used and tools that provide early warning indicators of a deepfake attack.
Common strategies used during a deepfake attack include::
- Requests that bypass normal approval paths, especially around payments, vendor onboarding, or credential resets
- Unusual urgency combined with a demand for secrecy
- Communication that “sounds right” but introduces a new channel, new device, or slight behavioural change
- Teams receiving high-stakes instructions outside expected working hours or during travel windows
Data Brokers Fuel Precision Targeting at an Unprecedented Scale
If deepfakes are the delivery mechanism. Data brokers are the fuel.
BlackCloak’s internal research found that 99 per cent of executives had personal information on more than three dozen data broker sites, with some appearing on over 100. Even more concerning, 40 per cent of broker listings contained the executive’s home IP address.
Those two numbers should change how you think about the risks executives pose to your organization. Attackers can reliably obtain a profile of an executive’s personal world, and in many cases, a technical breadcrumb that points directly to their home network.
This data is valuable because it enables precision. It supports everything that makes an attack land:
- Identity fraud becomes easier when attackers have consistent identifiers and family associations.
- Password reset attacks become more convincing when the attacker knows personal history, location, and relationships.
- Spear phishing becomes harder to spot when the lure matches real events, real contacts, and real language.
- Deepfake impersonation becomes more believable when the attacker has rich context to mirror the executive’s priorities and cadence.
There is also a governance constraint hiding in plain sight. In most organisations, CISOs have limited authority to act on the private digital lives of executives, even when those exposures create clear enterprise risk. Legal boundaries around personal privacy, combined with scope and resourcing realities, make in-house management difficult to justify or sustain.
The result is a gap between risk awareness and risk ownership. Data broker exposure often sits outside formal security programmes, not because it is misunderstood, but because it falls between privacy, legal, and security mandates. For attackers, that gap is useful.
Home Networks and Family Devices Are an Extension of the Corporate Attack Surface
Home networks aren't just “another endpoint”. They’re a different class of risk because they operate outside enterprise boundaries while still shaping enterprise outcomes.
The security gap is clear. The BlackCloak-Poneman survey revealed that only 41 per cent of organisations assess the risk to executives’ digital assets when they work at home. Only 38 per cent believe executives and families understand the threat to their personal digital assets.
Threat actors can compromise a household device that shares authentication tokens. They can leverage a poorly secured router. They can use home network visibility to time attacks, test responses, and build pressure. They can target family members because family members are often less trained, less protected, and more exposed.
What changes in 2026 is scale and complexity. More IoT devices, more “smart” services, more app-based administration, more third-party integrations. Household environments will continue to accumulate weak points, while executive lifestyles continue to increase mobility. The result is a growing set of uncontrolled entry paths into an executive’s identity, accounts, and life.
An executive’s home environment is a real extension of the attack surface, and attackers are treating it that way.
What to Prioritise in 2026 to Reduce Executive Cyber Risk
CISOs don't need another list of controls. They need a strategy that matches how these threats connect.
Start by treating the executive’s personal digital life as part of enterprise cyber resilience. If the executive is a high-value target, their exposure is business exposure. That framing makes funding, ownership, and reporting far easier to justify.
Next, build a unified threat model across deepfakes, data brokers, and home networks. These aren't parallel risks. They reinforce each other. Data brokers supply the context, deepfakes supply the credibility, and home environments supply the weak points that sit outside normal governance.
From there, focus on three practical priorities.
- Reduce exposed data and personal identifiers
A large portion of executive risk starts with information that is already out in the world. CISOs cannot “own” an executive’s private life, but they can put governance around reducing exposed personal data, monitoring for leaked information and personally identifiable information (PII), and ensuring there is a defined path to act when that data creates enterprise risk.
- Secure home networks and home devices as an extension of the attack surface
Home environments sit outside corporate control, but attackers treat them as a staging ground. CISOs need to equip executives with a holistic solution that also identifies and reduces device vulnerabilities across the home, close obvious misconfigurations, and limit the pivot paths that let a personal compromise become an organisational incident.
- Equip executives to spot AI-driven impersonation attempts
Deepfakes and AI-assisted social engineering are designed to defeat judgement under pressure. Alongside response playbooks, executives need practical support that helps them identify likely deepfake attacks, validate unusual requests, and pause before high-risk actions. This is where training alone often falls short, because the signal is increasingly engineered to look and sound real.
It's also worth noting that cybersecurity maturity is still uneven across many organisations. PwC’s Global Digital Trust Insights 2025 found that less than half of organisations rate their board’s cyber expertise as “very effective”, deliveringa signal that CISOs need board-ready language and measurable programmes for executive risk.
As executive cyber risk has expanded beyond corporate systems, many organisations are partnering with BlackCloak to implement a dedicated Digital Executive Protection programme. The appeal is not just coverage, but practicality. Externalising this responsibility allows security teams to move faster, reduce internal burden, and address executive exposure without crossing legal or privacy boundaries they are not equipped to manage alone.
With a singular focus on executive digital risk, BlackCloak is a pioneer in the DEP space. Drawing on real-world exposure data and frontline experience, its experts have identified the key market forces shaping executive risk in 2026, from AI-driven impersonation to the growing impact of personal data ecosystems.
Final Thoughts: Executive-Level Cyber Resilience Demands a New Playbook
By 2026, executive cyber risk cannot be contained by perimeter controls, awareness training, or policy reminders. Deepfakes, data brokers, and home networks are converging into one reality: attackers can manufacture trust, buy context, and exploit environments that sit outside corporate visibility. Treating these as separate problems creates blind spots. Treating them as one unified threat model creates leverage.
The practical path forward is clear–implement a Digital Executive Protection strategy that defines executive impersonation as a business-critical incident type, constantly monitor and reduce executive exposure as part of cyber risk governance, and build escalation paths that support speed without sacrificing verification. When those pieces are in place, executive-level cyber resilience stops being reactive and becomes a competitive advantage.
As organisations prepare for the next wave of executive-targeted attacks, the combination of BlackCloak’s Digital Executive Protection solution and EM360Tech’s wider security industry insights gives leaders a clearer path forward, and a stronger basis for decisions that hold up in the boardroom.
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