For CISOs and CSOs, your leadership’s digital life is your new cybersecurity challenge.
What is an Executive Personal Supply Chain™?
You’re familiar with the risks associated with your company’s extensive, digitally connected supply chain (customers, vendor portals, cloud providers, APIs). And you have security tools in place to address related threats. But other risks are still out there. Your senior staff, executives and board members have their own digital personal supply chains. These include email accounts; social media sites (LinkedIn, Instagram); portals and logins to financial institutions, health systems, retail businesses, and schools. That opens a new door to your company’s data.
Why should your company care about it?
We’re seeing it happen more. Attackers are bypassing the organization and targeting its leaders. More often now, attackers are bypassing the organization and targeting its leaders. A breach in an executive supply chain can give attackers an entry point back into your company – and that’s not good. That means you need to address your leadership’s personal supply chains as part of your company’s digital supply chain. That’s complicated and not in the scope of protecting your perimeter.
One instinct is to wonder if it’s really that big of a threat. Consider this; it’s part of what we call the Aspen Forest Effect™. Instead of many separate trees, an Aspen Forest is actually a single living organism with all the trees connected by the same root system. Your company and related digital supply chain are its own cybersecurity Aspen Forest. (You should already be addressing this.) Your leadership’s personal supply chains are also in your Aspen Forest, and for the most part they are unprotected. The hackers know this, and they’re ready to pounce.
What can happen, and what should your cybersecurity solution do?
If you’re a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). When hackers get to your company through your executives, they can steal data, impersonate leadership to conduct phishing campaigns, and more. Your solution should include personal device and home network security; Dark Web and credential exposure monitoring; fraud and identity theft protection; privacy and data-broker removal; threat intelligence tied to actual exposure; and incident response support.
If you’re a Chief Security Officer (CSO). When hackers get to your company through your executives, they can shut down operations and knock out assets. More alarming is the threat to leadership – breaches can mean real-world harassment, swatting, physical confrontation and even kidnapping. Your solution should include monitoring online threats and attitudes through social media, public profiles, and other forms of open-source intelligence (OSINT); detecting doxxing and privacy exposure; preparing for events and travel; and investigating people making threats.
Have the discussion with leadership.
As the CISO or CSO, you must help your senior staff, executives and board members understand how their own digital personal supply chains can affect them and the company. For executives, these threats are personal and can be emotional. Your executive cybersecurity solution should help leaders and their households understand where they are exposed, reduce those exposures, respond quickly to serious issues, and do so in a supportive way that respects personal privacy.
How Guardian can help CISOs and CSOs
Guardian Legacy™ is a fully managed, enterprise-level cybersecurity service built to secure the personal supply chains of senior executives and their families. It is a complete program, not a single point of accountability. Legacy addresses the exposure your corporation’s security program cannot reach and closes a gap that boards and legal counsel increasingly recognize as a governance issue.
Cybersecurity at this level requires more than monitoring. It requires offense, continuously hunting for exposure, identifying gaps, and eliminating the paths that threat actors to rely on before they are used. Guardian operates from the attacker’s perspective, actively looking for what is exposed rather than waiting on alerts. We monitor and test continuously to prove that protection is working, so decisions are made with confidence, not assumptions.
Request your confidential Executive Cyber Exposure Assessment today
Let’s talk: Luke.Morrow@guardiancssp.com
Your cybersecurity protects the company. Guardian Legacy protects your executives at home.