Ahead of Black Hat 2026, Joel Witts, Content Director at Expert Insights, talks with Dr. Chris Pierson, Founder and CEO of BlackCloak, about the growing risk facing corporate executives outside the four walls of the company, in their homes, personal accounts and family lives.
Pierson is a former CISO, chief privacy officer, and longtime Department of Homeland Security advisor who founded BlackCloak and created the digital executive protection category. He explains why the millions companies spend on cybersecurity rarely extend to the personal lives of their executives, and why that gap has become a material business risk, from data broker exposure and personal account breaches to home networks that can be compromised despite passing 41 straight weeks of penetration testing.
In this episode, they discuss:
Why executives and their family members are targeted through data brokers, breached passwords and public profiles, and how that access can lead back into the company
Real incidents BlackCloak has responded to, including a compromised home alarm and camera system and a virtual kidnapping scam built from social media activity
How live, real-time deepfake voice and video attacks have outpaced Zoom and Teams-based verification, and why attackers simply call an executive’s personal device instead
BlackCloak’s new circle of trust expansion, announced at Black Hat 2026, which extends out-of-band impersonation protection to trusted third parties like wealth advisors, attorneys and family staff
Why digital executive protection has to operate outside the company, structured more like a health benefit than a corporate security function, to protect both executive privacy and the business
