Executive Protection from Physical and Cyber Threats
“Executive protection” is a catchall term used to describe strategies and methodologies for keeping all types of VIPs — including CEOs and other executives, lawmakers, professional athletes, and celebrities — safe from both physical and cyber threats. These VIPs are often the direct target of physical threats. When it comes to cyber threats, executives and others often act as a conduit for wrongdoing: criminals use their personal information and credentials to gain access to sensitive or proprietary data.
Any sound executive protection strategy must protect VIPS from both physical and cyber threats. Security teams need risk intelligence to guard against both threat categories.
Learn the basics
Blog
Executive Protection: Defend Against Physical, Digital, Global Threats
Executive protection conjures up images of agents with earpieces driving black SUVs and talking into their wrists. But there’s much more to keeping VIPs and dig...
Use Case
Using Babel Street to Increase Physical Security for Corporate Executives and Employees
Use case with screen shots on how Babel Street can be used for executive and employee protection
Blog
Publicly Available Information Explained
Every day, billions of people and countless devices create an ocean of data. The scale is unprecedented—IDC predicts 463 exabytes* will be generated every day b...
Protecting executives from physical threats
Physical threats to VIPs consist of both direct and indirect threats.
Direct physical threats include those of assassination, other physical violence, and kidnappings. These threats are realized far too frequently. In 2025, two Democratic Minnesota legislators and their partners were shot in their homes. Two died in the politically motivated attacks.[1] The assassin was later discovered to have a hit list of 45 lawmakers.[2] That same year, Charlie Kirk was murdered at a speaking event at Utah Valley University.[3] Early in 2026, Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost was assaulted at the Sundance Film Festival.[4]
But the violence isn’t limited to lawmakers. CEOs and other corporate executives face similar peril. In 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead on the streets of New York.[5] In 2019, former employees kidnapped a tech executive-turned-cannabis entrepreneur from his home in Santa Cruz, Ca. They later murdered him.[6] Automakers, oil executives, and others have faced protests and violence from climate-change activists and other groups.
While less upsetting than direct threats, indirect threats also endanger VIPs. These types of threats arise from events such as geopolitical upheavals or natural disasters. They can affect anyone — but may harm a company if an executive is incapacitated.To manage both direct and indirect threats, security professionals must implement robust measures for VIP safety.
These should include:
Assessing risk
Security teams should identify potential physical threats, especially those that may arise from activists, disgruntled employees and those with ideologies directly opposed to those represented by the VIP. (The CEO of a family planning clinic may face threats from extremist religious groups; the president of a gun rights organization may face threats from extreme members of the gun-control movement.) Security teams must examine these threats within the context of an executive’s routine — including his home life, daily travel routes, work habits, and social habits — to spot and mitigate potential vulnerabilities.
Securing residences, transportation, and workplaces
Security teams should secure executive residences with gates, cameras, and motion sensors. Additional access-control measures should include visitor identification and verification. On-site security guards may be necessary. Executive homes should have safe rooms.
To ensure safety during transport, the executive should employ professional drivers trained in security and defensive driving. Vehicles should have armored plating, bulletproof glass, and run-flat tires — along with technology such as GPS tracking and emergency communication systems. Routes driven to and from work and other frequently visited locales should be changed regularly to avoid predictability.
Finally, workplace security cannot be discounted. Executive offices should contain surveillance cameras and alarm systems. Access to executive offices should be restricted. Security personnel should be stationed there, as well as at key areas within the workplace. Emergency protocols, including evacuation plans and escape routes for all employees, should be implemented.
Providing security for executive travel
Executive travel presents special challenges to security teams. To fully understand and prepare for the security risks presented by certain locales, advance reconnaissance may be needed.
Risks examined should include both geopolitical scenarios (terrorist activity, protests, demonstrations) and the potential for natural disaster. Extreme weather events are becoming increasingly common. And no one needs a CEO caught in the eye of a hurricane.
Crisis management
Security teams should develop emergency response plans for managing crises as they arise. Plans should include protocols that ensure reliable communications among members of the protection team, and with outside agencies such as law enforcement and medical services. Clear procedures for coping with emergency situations — including natural disasters, medical emergencies, political unrest, and terrorist attacks — must also be developed.
Protecting against cyber threats
Protecting a VIP’s person is only half of a comprehensive executive protection program. Executives and the companies they represent must also be protected from cybercrime.
Cybercriminals typically target executives to gain access to proprietary and sensitive corporate data. These attacks can compromise corporate strategy, disrupt operations, tarnish reputations, and cost millions — even billions — to remediate.
Consider an attack on an Oklahoma software company that provides system management tools to more than 30,000 public and private companies — including United States federal agencies. Attackers, believed to be associated with Russian espionage operations, inserted malicious code into the provider’s system. This code targeted the updates that the company regularly sends its customers. Therefore, the attackers accessed not just company information, but information stored in client organizations. More than 18,000 clients installed the malicious updates.[7] Among organizations affected were the United States departments of Homeland Security, State, and Commerce.
Credential theft — caused by phishing, malware, or other attacks that enable criminals to obtain an executive’s login — is believed to have been a key component of the attack.[8] Remediation costs for the software company and its clients are estimated to be more than $100 billion.[9]
Or look at one of the world’s largest aluminum companies. Its 35,000 employees worked in more than 40 countries. One of its employees opened an infected email he believed to have been sent by a trusted customer. The email enabled hackers to plant a computer virus in company systems, locking files on corporate servers and PCs. Hackers demanded ransom to unlock these files. The company decided against paying the ransom and worked with a major technology provider to remediate the situation. Estimated cost? Seventy-one million.[10]
Social engineering attacks
These ploys exploit social mores and the workplace hierarchy to induce employees to hand over sensitive information or grant access to corporate systems.
A social engineering deception can be run via text, instant messages, or email. Email deceptions are called “business email compromise” (BEC) attacks. They are a type of phishing, spear phishing, or whaling attack. (“Spear phishing” and “whaling” are specific types of phishing attacks that target the accounts of high-profile individuals, often using very specific information about the VIP to convince email recipients of the sender’s authenticity.)
BEC attacks typically work something like this.
Criminals send emails to the CEO’s subordinates. These emails have been engineered to look as if they come from the executive herself.
Sometimes, criminals gain access to the executive’s actual email address via credential theft.
As often, though, cybercriminals don’t have access to the executive’s actual email. They may use spoofed email addresses: or an email coming from a domain that looks very much like the organization’s actual domain, often just off by a letter or two: ceo@ourcoompany.com rather than ceo@ourcompany.com. (Note the extra “o” in the domain of the first address.) Or they may not bother to use a spoofed domain at all, instead simply writing the display name appearing atop the email to mimic the executive’s. Anyone can write a display name that reads Jane Smith, CEO. Employees must look at the actual domain to see if the email is originating from corporate systems. Many employees fail to do so. They see the display name, and assume the email is legitimate.
Once employees open a deceptive email, they’re often hooked. The criminal, posing as an executive, may write to an employee in accounting to say the company is very late paying a specific vendor, and to please transfer money to a certain account ASAP. (Of course, the account is one controlled by the criminal.) The criminal may write to a business-unit head claiming he’s about to walk into an important investor meeting but forgot to save the company’s strategic plan to the PC he’s using for the event. He needs the employee to send him that plan immediately. Or he may write to someone in IT saying that he’s experiencing computer issues, and that his system is telling him to click on a certain link. The IT worker clicks on the link, and unknowingly downloads malware. Through that malware, the cybercriminal gains access to corporate systems.
In BEC attacks, criminals rely on an employee’s willingness to do what their bosses ask. Adding time pressure to the requests all but ensures that the employee won’t spend much time questioning the legitimacy of the email.
You may wonder how the cybercriminal knows who cuts the checks at a given corporation, who can access strategic plans, or whom to contact in IT. Savvy attackers plan their crimes well ahead of time, building a deceptive online presence to connect with potential victims. For example, a cybercriminal might develop a fake executive profile (called a “sock puppet” account) on a professional networking site. The criminal then invites employees of the executive’s company to join this network. Employees almost inevitably accept a networking request from the boss.
Once connected, it is easy for the attacker to glean a more in-depth view of each employee and his or her responsibilities. All the cybercriminal has to do is visit the profile page of each employee in his network. From there, it is easy to say, “Jane, are you still in the office? Or are you driving back to Rockville? I see you’re reading your messages. I need that strategic plan STAT!” In this example, the attacker bolsters his credentials by mentioning the name of the employee’s hometown — information easily accessible from the employee’s profile.
Other attack methods include:
Executive protection: A unified approach
Effective executive security depends on a comprehensive approach that covers both the physical and digital realms. Security teams must be able to spot threats, stop them before they can be realized, and quickly mitigate any damage caused.
Babel Street can help. The mission-focused AI-powered Babel Street Risk Intelligence Platform rapidly and persistently searches petabytes of PAI and CAI published in more than 200 languages. This data originates from billions of top-level domains; the deep and dark web; and other sources. Among these sources are social media platforms, real-time interactions generated on millions of message boards, and online comments.
Unique to the industry, Babel Street understands dozens of languages, and translates results into the user’s language of choice. Always-on monitoring keeps searches running regardless of whether anyone is actively using them, appending new information to each search term as that information is uncovered.
How does this help in the protection of executives and other VIPs?
The process works like this
Our monitoring capabilities persistently search information sources for signs of threat or violent intent. These may include direct threats to the safety and wellbeing of a specific protectee (someone posting, for example, “I’m going to get the Speaker of the House and his family,” or “Polluter exec to attend summit in Our Town. Environmentalists, show him what you think of him!” ). Security teams can also use Babel Street technology to search for indirect threats, such as emerging political instabilities or natural disasters that may affect an executive at home or while traveling.
Executive protection agents and other security professionals use Babel Street to search for specific “red flag” keywords that may indicate a threat to the protectee. In the case of direct, violent intent, Babel Street can flag the post, note its author, then search the author’s other online identities/accounts and activities. Babel Street can even link the author’s screen name to a real-world person and provide his or her contact information. Babel Street further pinpoints groups whose activities may interest security staffs (i.e., a splinter group associated with one political party, decrying what it perceives as the evils of another political party). With Babel Street, security analysts can map the relationship of individual social media accounts to the social media accounts belonging to that group; identify the most influential accounts; then closely monitor the posts from those accounts.
Security teams can also use Babel Street to monitor geopolitical and geographical situations worldwide, further heightening security for their protectees. Searches for kidnapping trends will quickly enable analysts to learn that Nigeria has a kidnapping crisis, spurred by poverty, political unrest, and religious extremism. Understanding this, security teams may discourage an executive from attending a conference in that country. Searches can also unveil political instabilities, natural disasters, and areas prone to riots or demonstrations.
Similar capabilities help security teams spot and stop digital threats. Our search tools can scour the internet — including the dark web — for signs of stolen credentials or mentions of the executive’s company. These mentions are possible signs of an emerging BEC attack, reputation attack, or man-in-the middle attack. Babel Street can monitor social media for signs of potential social engineering attacks, such as information gathering on key personnel. Our platform can monitor chatrooms and other forums for discussion of the company, which may signal potential threat activity.
Holistic executive protection is a two-pronged effort. It requires security teams to safeguard the physical health of VIPs and the security of the organizations those VIPs represent. Babel Street can help with both.
FAQs
“Executive protection” is a term used to describe strategies and methodologies designed to keep VIPs — CEOs, executives, lawmakers, celebrities, athletes and others — safe from both physical and cyber threats.
End Notes
1. Wikipedia, “2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators,” accessed January 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_legislators
2. NPR, “The suspect in the shooting of 2 Minnesota lawmakers had a 'hit list' of 45 officials,” June 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/06/16/nx-s1-5433748/minnesota-shooting-suspect-vance-boelter-arrested-melissa-hortman-john-hoffman
3. Cohen, Rebecca and Helsel, Phil, “What we know about Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” NBC News, September 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/know-charlie-kirks-assassination-rcna230552
4. Young, Jin Yu, “Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost Is Assaulted at Sundance Film Festival,” The New York Times, January 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/us/maxwell-alejandro-frost-assaulted-sundance-festival.html
5. Gabriel, Trip, “Brian Thompson, Chief Executive of UnitedHealthcare, Dies at 50,” The New York Times, December 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/04/nyregion/brian-thompson-dead.html?searchResultPosition=12
6. Fetzer, Richard, “Did push-ups and disrespect lead to murder?” CBS News/48 Hours, August 2023, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tushar-atre-death-did-pushups-and-disrespect-lead-to-murder/
7. Oladimenji, Saheed and Kerner, Sea Michael, “SolarWinds hack explained: Everything you need to know,” TechTarget, November 2023, https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/SolarWinds-hack-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know
8. Ibid
9. Ratnam, Gopal, “Cleaning up SolarWinds hack may cost as much as $100 billion,” Roll Call, January 2021, https://rollcall.com/2021/01/11/cleaning-up-solarwinds-hack-may-cost-as-much-as-100-billion/
10. Briggs, Bill, “Hackers hit Norsk Hydro with ransomware. The company responded with transparency,” Microsoft Source, December 2019, https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/digital-transformation/hackers-hit-norsk-hydro-ransomware-company-responded-transparency/
Disclaimer
All names, companies, and incidents portrayed in this document are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, companies, and products are intended or should be inferred.