Digital executive protection services are usually acquired through the office of the CISO or CSO, though executives themselves often acquire the services independently and then involve their CSOs, according to Chris Pierson, CEO of BlackCloak, which he founded in 2018 with the sole purpose of protecting executives from online threats that can lead to personal and business compromises.

Pierson recalls a particularly dicey job when he was chief privacy officer at Royal Bank of Scotland during the time its highly-controversial CEO, Fred Goodwin, came under fire for bad governance, resigned, and ultimately lost his knighthood. “It crossed my mind that this was an attack surface we need to do something about. After that, when I took new CISO jobs, I kept getting calls from executives, board members, even our VCs asking for help around their personal cybersecurity.”

The problem: there was no 24/7 monitoring capability that would watch over the executives’ private networks, personal devices, and online footprints, while scanning for external threats on the dark web –and provide response support while also protecting the executives’ personal privacy. He asked himself, “Who’s going to mitigate those risks so that they don’t come back to bite the company, cause reputational damage, leak intellectual property, or access sensitive corporate documents that may be sent to or from their personal email?”