The escalating physical security threat towards corporate leaders has highlighted the challenges many businesses face in staying abreast of the evolving spectrum of risks their people and operations face.
In an era of increasing political polarization, populist rhetoric, and coarsening civic standards, the protection of key executives is not only imperative in fulfilling organizations’ duty of care and maintaining their public reputations, but also a core requirement for business continuity and preserving market value. Now, as many corporate leaders look to revitalize security functions, emerging technologies for online threat assessment and risk attribution offer a new model for protecting key personnel, balancing commerciality with the generation of actionable intelligence.
Direct physical security threats represent the latest escalation in the decades-long alienation of corporate America from its customer based. With Americans more polarized than ever, CEOs have already spent years walking a tightrope on hot button social issues, with various high-profile corporate boycotts and political controversies causing PR problems, financial losses, and executive firings. Under presidents Trump and Biden, customers increasingly demanded that corporations take sides in America’s grinding culture wars, inevitably alienating those of the opposite stance. Now, the target of public anger is increasingly shifting to corporations themselves, due to decaying public trust, post-pandemic economic challenges, and populist attacks. The percentage of Americans who say they have ‘No’ or ‘Very Little’ trust in big business has risen to 42 percent, while 39 percent of Americans now say they view capitalism in a ‘Somewhat Negative’ or ‘Very Negative’ light, and 72 percent of Americans describe ‘corporate greed’ as the main cause of inflation. Following this energy, prominent politicians of the right and left, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Green and Senator Bernie Sanders, have built a following assailing business, helping to bring anti-business sentiment into the mainstream. Combined with a general coarsening of civic discourse – per April 2024 polling, 20 percent of Americans now say violence may be necessary to get the country back on track – corporate leaders should be realistic about rising risks to themselves and their businesses.
Now, the target of public anger is increasingly shifting to corporations themselves, due to decaying public trust, post-pandemic economic challenges, and populist attacks.”
The chief danger of extreme rhetoric is that it shifts to violent action. ‘Lone wolf’ attackers, self-radicalized by a range of ideologies, grievances, or unpredictable personal factors, pose significant security and risk challenges to corporate security professionals because of the difficulty of detecting them. Operating independently, they can plan and execute attacks with minimal external clues, making them harder to identify through traditional intelligence or surveillance methods. Even the most well-resourced corporate security departments are challenged to extract actionable intelligence from general background chatter surrounding prominent executives, the challenge of balancing executive protection with the visibility and accessibility high-level corporate positions require, and the anonymity of many potential threat actors.
Even the most well-resourced corporate security departments are challenged to extract actionable intelligence from general background chatter surrounding prominent executives.”
Now however, a new generation of AI-powered tools allow intelligence specialists to quickly produce comprehensive executive threat assessments, equipping our expert threat intelligence analysts to review vast amounts of social media content and other data to identify actual and developing threat actors in real time. These tools not only allow for the identification of current threats, but also the ongoing monitoring of potential problems and developing sentiments, and are cost-effective enough to integrate into everyday risk management processes. This intelligence is most actionable when combined with an assessment of the protectee’s own online information profile, reviewing a comprehensive range of public and non-public data, such as Dark Web data leaks, to identify potential vulnerabilities. Where vulnerabilities are found – such as an exposed home address, a familial relationship, or a record of movements – this assessment equips corporate security professionals to mitigate the breach or make an informed judgment as to required security. Finally, this analysis can support offensive as well as defensive action, leveraging new capacities to enrich online identifiers in order to uncover other accounts and activity connected to a threat actor, and potentially linking them to a real-world identity. This intelligence supports proactive security measures, such as referrals to law enforcement or injunctive relief.
All kinds of businesses face growing security risks in an increasingly polarized political and social climate, but many have been slow to address critical gaps despite the reputational, operational, and market importance of mitigating risks to key personnel. As corporate leaders reassess their security plans, new methodologies for online threat assessment and threat attribution present attractive solutions for generating actionable intelligence on threat actors in an efficient and cost-effective manner.