Page 206 - Cyber Defense eMagazine Special RSA Conference Annual Edition for 2022
P. 206
Protect Your Executives’ Personal Digital
Lives to Protect Your Company
By Dr Chris Pierson, BlackCloak Founder & CEO
Earlier this year, news broke that Chinese hackers had been caught sending sophisticated phishing
emails to the personal Gmail accounts of US-government agency employees. While the nation-state
cybercriminals exact motivations will never be fully understood, many believe that they were targeting
personal email accounts to circumvent the agency’s robust cybersecurity and gain entry through lateral
movement into the digital infrastructure.
As the lines between the professional and personal have almost completely blurred, this type of lateral
cyberattack is increasingly common; and it poses a major threat to the enterprise. Today, the soft
underbelly of enterprise security has become the personal digital lives - the online privacy, personal
devices, and home networks - of executives, Board Members, and other high-profile employees with
access to finances, proprietary data, and personal information that cybercriminals want to compromise
and place under their control.
206
