Practical habits that prevent the attacks leaders actually face.
If you’re an executive, you’re not just “another user” in the eyes of attackers—you’re a high‑leverage target. Your inbox, phone number, calendar, and assistants can become the shortest path to money, sensitive data, or internal access.
This isn’t theoretical. Below are real-world examples of how executive-targeted attacks play out—followed by simple, non-technical habits that meaningfully reduce your risk.
Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks often succeed because the request feels normal: the right names, the right timing, and just enough business context. One public example involved an executive’s organization wiring a large payment after attackers impersonated someone in their orbit and blended the request into a real workflow. The clue was subtle—an email address off by a single character.
A common pattern is a message that appears to come from a senior leader requesting W‑2 or payroll information. That data can be used for identity theft and fraudulent tax filings. The attack works because recipients don’t want to slow down “the CEO.”
Help desks and support teams are frequent targets. If an attacker can convincingly impersonate an employee (or an executive), they may be able to reset credentials or bypass controls. Post-incident reporting on major hospitality-sector disruption has described social engineering as a key initial access vector followed by significant operational outages.
AI voice and video impersonation has moved from “novel” to practical. Public reporting has described cases where employees were pressured into transfers after receiving a convincing voice call from a “senior executive,” and more recently, cases where a video meeting appeared to include senior leaders and was later determined to involve deepfakes.
The common thread is simple: authority + urgency + realism. Executives are targeted because people hesitate to slow down “important requests.”
These are intentionally non-technical. Think of them as high‑impact habits that reduce real fraud risk without slowing your life down.
Most losses happen when teams treat a message as “good enough” because it looks familiar.
Rule: Any request involving payments, bank details, payroll/tax documents, credentials, or sensitive files must be verified using a second channel you trust (not replying to the original email/text).
Treat “looks like the CEO” as a risk signal—not a trust signal.
Slow down when a message includes:
Phone-based social engineering is a main path into modern organizations, including help desks and account recovery flows.
Seeing a face on a call is no longer proof. If money or sensitive data is involved:
Attackers use public context (roles, assistants’ names, reporting lines, travel, vendors) to make fraud feel legitimate. Less public detail means fewer believable pretexts.
Even when the entry point is “human” (phishing, impersonation), credential theft is often the follow-on. A password manager and multi-factor authentication remove a huge chunk of easy wins for attackers.
You don’t need to be technical—you just need it set up correctly once.
If you’re thinking, “I could do some of this, but I don’t want to guess,” that’s exactly where an executive consult pays off.
402 InfoSec provides a discreet, practical Executive Cyber Hygiene Review, typically covering:
The goal isn’t perfection. It’s becoming meaningfully harder to target than the next executive—without slowing your day down.
Sources mentioned (public reporting): Proofpoint; The Guardian; AP News; Forbes; Barracuda Blog; Netwrix; Marshall Dennehey.