Security teams must be able to prioritize the targets and threats that pose the biggest risk in order to focus their limited resources where they will have the greatest impact—which helps explain the rise of executive doxxing monitoring, also known as VIP monitoring. While it’s important to know the data or documents of any employee that has been exposed, it’s especially important to know when executives have been exposed, and particularly dangerous when executive doxxing goes unnoticed.
Executive Doxxing Monitoring Explained
What is executive doxxing monitoring?
When someone posts personal information, private data, login credentials, or other sensitive information related to an executive onto the internet, it puts that person at great risk. It also puts the company they work for at risk since executives have access to important data and privileges that could be exploited in a cyber attack.
Security teams need to be aware of this threat and proactive about responding, relying on executive doxxing monitoring to learn when information gets exposed, where it was posted, what it includes, and who potentially has access. Without this step, highly sensitive information could be flowing around the internet and changing hands between malicious parties without anyone inside the organization knowing there’s a problem until after an attack begins.
How is executive doxxing monitoring conducted?
One option is searching manually for exposed information. This has the benefit of applying human judgment to the search process to make more nuanced judgements about threats and risks. However, the major downside of collecting any kind of threat intelligence manually is having to watch the entire internet, including all of social media, the dark web, and private Telegram channels, continuously 24/7/365. Security teams will be unable to find the vast majority of doxxing materials, and risk getting burned out in the process. For those reasons, companies are increasingly choosing a second option for executive monitoring: automated threat intelligence tools that extend the hunt everywhere, all the time.
What are the benefits of executive doxxing monitoring?
Cybersecurity improves in several ways, as does the efficiency of cybersecurity operations:
- Focused Threat Hunting – Looking for this highly valuable form of threat intelligence data helps security teams find some of the most sensitive intelligence being exposed and make the most of their threat hunting resources.
- Proactive Cybersecurity Measures – Knowing if executives have been doxxed is a prerequisite for deactivating compromised accounts, adjusting security controls, or making other changes designed to prevent attacks before they begin.
- Lower Risk and Damage – Being able to prevent attacks lowers a company’s cyber risk, and stopping sensitive information from leaking helps to keep bad actors from causing as much harm as they would like.
Why Executive Doxxing Monitoring is Becoming Essential
How common is executive doxxing monitoring?
As instances of doxxing and attacks targeting executives both become more common, companies will put more resources into monitoring. Likewise, as automated tools make executive doxxing monitoring more accessible, less cumbersome, and overall more effective, it will become more common as well. Executives at most large companies, along with many politicians, sports figures, celebrities, and other VIPs, currently monitor for doxxing, but the risk applies to anyone with publicity or power, pushing monitoring to become more common all the time.
What is the risk of going without executive doxxing monitoring?
In the worst case, the risk is a direct threat to the health and safety of executives and their families. When bad actors publicize the address where an executive lives, it opens the door to any number of dangerous possibilities. Doxxing also makes an executive, their accounts, and the IT they rely on more susceptible to cyber attacks by identifying an executive as a potential target. The risks of executive doxxing extend from professional life into the personal realm and span both the physical and digital worlds, making them extreme and unpredictable if left unmonitored.
How will executive doxxing monitoring evolve moving forward?
Following the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024, in which a gunman used OSINT to anticipate the victim’s movements and lie in ambush, security teams began looking at executive risk in new ways. At the same time, they were increasingly relying on threat intelligence to keep pace with fast-developing attackers as detection and response became less reliable. Combine that with technological advances enabling automated threat hunting, and more teams are likely to take up executive doxxing monitoring and conduct it on a larger scale. In short order it could become a standard part of cybersecurity and something considered mandatory for effective governance, risk, and compliance.
How Flare Handles Executive Doxxing Monitoring
Does Flare provide executive doxxing monitoring?
Flare has developed a platform for continuous threat exposure management that monitors thousands of sources throughout the clear, deep, and dark web to find threat intelligence including: stolen data, exposed credentials, secrets for sale, and chatter between attackers. Flare can monitor for executive information—along with many other forms of threat intelligence—and send alerts whenever something appears online. In addition to finding when and where executives have been doxxed, Flare supplies contextual threat intelligence to help security teams analyze the threat, prioritize the risk, and diagnose the response.
What does Flare do differently with executive doxxing monitoring?
A few things distinguish Flare from other solutions for executive doxxing monitoring. First is the fact that Flare supplies myriad forms of threat and identity intelligence, including but not limited to executive doxxing, making it a robust tool for managing threats. Second, Flare has visibility into hacker communities on the dark web, Telegram channels that are invite-only, and other secretive sources of threat intelligence, many of which are invisible to other tools. Third is Flare’s ability to combine threat intelligence from multiple sources into a single, customizable view complete with context and even automated remediation in some cases, making executive doxxing monitoring a holistic part of intelligence gathering, identity protection, and holistic cybersecurity.
How do security teams benefit from using Flare for executive doxxing monitoring?
- Automated Monitoring – Eliminate the time, labor, and staff necessary to monitor round the clock with automation that delivers better results.
- Real-Time Discovery – Find threats soon after they appear online to put a response in action before, not after, an attack occurs.
- Broad and Deep Visibility – Discover doxxing wherever it’s happening with visibility that extends across the entire internet and into places where attackers congregate, like Telegram.
- Strategic Threat Intel – Gain insight into what attackers plan to do with doxxed materials by spying on their planning and organizing sessions.
- Filtered Alert Feeds – Avoid alert fatigue and focus only on what matters with filters that let users define for themselves what’s important and what’s not.
- Historic Threat Data – Learn more about executive risk by searching a historic database with billions of pieces of threat intelligence collected over the past decade.
Executive Doxxing Monitoring and Flare
Flare gives any company the ability to add executive doxxing monitoring to their cybersecurity arsenal while giving executives peace of mind that their home, family, identity, and wellbeing are not under attack. With a comprehensive solution for monitoring threats, managing exposures, and mitigating data leaks, Flare gives security teams an edge in the form of threat intelligence and a dynamic defense against credential attacks and account takeover. Executives will always be under attack, so equip the security team to always be aware. Flare is the singular solution.
Learn more about using Flare for executive doxxing monitoring.
