Sophisticated attacks enabled by AI
Senior executives are a prize target for attackers, offering one of the most direct ways to reach deep into an organisation’s systems. Increasingly, sophisticated attacks now start with intelligence gathering: open-source footprints, leaked credentials, travel patterns, and information gathered on the people close to executives. Then AI-enabled techniques let attackers move faster — and at a far greater scale — than was previously possible.
Executives are an attack target and vector into organisations.
Closing the gaps to protect executives
While security professionals recognise the dangers, the risk is rarely owned by a single team with a unified strategy. Executive protection sits across cyber, intelligence, fraud, and physical security at once. That creates gaps that attackers can exploit.
"In the incidents we handle, the executive is often the starting point for a wider attack. When strong technical controls are in place, attackers may go after people instead — they treat senior executives as a way into the whole organisation, find an opening, and scale from there.”— Jan Kaastrup, Chief Cybersecurity Advisor, CSIS
The appeal to attackers is efficiency. Compromising a junior employee buys a foothold that still needs weeks of lateral movement to reach anything valuable; compromising an executive can deliver signing authority, sensitive data, or financial access in a single step. That is why leadership is increasingly the target — and why the same public exposure gets used two ways: to deceive the executive directly, or to impersonate them so that instructions to finance, HR, or IT carry the weight of a real name.
To help CISOs close the gaps, CSIS, with our threat intelligence division SecAlliance, is running a 60-minute webinar on 1 September 2026. The session will highlight the specific types of attacks now being orchestrated, explain how AI is being used to amplify the impact, and detail what security leaders should do to respond.
What the webinar covers
Drawing on what our incident response and threat intelligence teams see first-hand, the panel will explain:
- How executive targeting is changing, and why attackers increasingly treat leadership as the way in
- What real incident response cases show about how these attacks unfold
- Emerging patterns in compromised credentials, impersonation, and fraud
- Where cyber exposure turns into physical risk
- What security leaders should prioritise first to reduce executive vulnerability
Intelligence and cybersecurity experts
The session will be run by practising professionals from CSIS and SecAlliance:
- Natasia Kalajdziovski — Senior Threat Intelligence Analyst, SecAlliance
- Aadrien Luke — Head of Fusion, SecAlliance
- Jan Kaastrup — Chief Cybersecurity Advisor, CSIS
Details and registration
📅 Date: 1 September 2026
🕘 Time: 15:00 CEST / 14:00 BST
📍 Location: Online
Executive protection essentials
What is executive cyber protection?
Executive cyber protection is the practice of reducing the digital risks that specifically target senior leaders, extending traditional executive protection beyond physical security. It addresses threats such as phishing and impersonation, credential and identity compromise, doxxing, and deepfakes, and it treats an executive's personal devices, home network, and online footprint as part of the organisation's attack surface. Because that exposure can lead to fraud, data loss, or physical targeting, executive protection should be managed as a coordinated effort across cyber, intelligence, fraud, and physical security.
Why are senior executives targeted?
Executives hold access, authority, and visibility, which makes them a shortcut to systems, funds, and decisions. Attackers build a picture from open-source information, leaked credentials, and travel or network details, then use impersonation, fraud, and AI-enabled techniques to act on it.
Who should own executive protection?
It rarely fits neatly into one team. Executive risk spans cyber, threat intelligence, fraud, and physical security, so protection works best when those functions coordinate rather than leaving it to IT alone.
How can organisations reduce executive exposure?
Intelligence-led monitoring can surface exposure earlier — leaked credentials, impersonation attempts, and physical-risk indicators — so it can be dealt with before an attack lands. The webinar covers where security leaders should focus first.
Go deeper: preparing senior executives
Protecting executives is one side of the problem. The other is what happens if an incident does reach leadership and decisions must be made quickly and under pressure.
Our mini-guide, How to strengthen your crisis readiness in three months (or less), sets out 15 practical ways to prepare your leadership team to act, with a checklist you can work through directly.
For more on why this belongs on the executive agenda rather than just with IT, see Cyber Crisis Management: The Critical Role of Executive Leadership in a Cyberattack.
Stay updated
Sign up for our newsletter and get the latest cybersecurity analysis, reports and events from CSIS delivered straight to your inbox.
CSIS Newsletter
