Cyberattacks against business leaders have increased from 43% in 2023 to 51% in 2025, following the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Cybersecurity Dive reports.
Moreover, intrusions involving deepfakes aimed at executives were reported by nearly 40% of security professionals this year, compared with almost a third in 2023, according to a BlackCloak-sponsored Ponemon Institute survey. "As AI technology advances, attackers are shifting their focus from technical exploits to human emotions using deeply personal and well-orchestrated social engineering tactics," said BlackCloak founder and CEO Chris Pierson. Increasingly prevalent cyberattacks aimed at executives following the Thompson murder have also been observed by Flashpoint researchers, who discovered the emergence of websites with data from several companies' executives. "Based on the likelihood that personal contact information was present on these websites, threat actors could use the provided information to conduct additional searches on open source platforms or paid data aggregator sites and potentially gain access to additional PII such as residential addresses," Flashpoint researchers said.
Moreover, intrusions involving deepfakes aimed at executives were reported by nearly 40% of security professionals this year, compared with almost a third in 2023, according to a BlackCloak-sponsored Ponemon Institute survey. "As AI technology advances, attackers are shifting their focus from technical exploits to human emotions using deeply personal and well-orchestrated social engineering tactics," said BlackCloak founder and CEO Chris Pierson. Increasingly prevalent cyberattacks aimed at executives following the Thompson murder have also been observed by Flashpoint researchers, who discovered the emergence of websites with data from several companies' executives. "Based on the likelihood that personal contact information was present on these websites, threat actors could use the provided information to conduct additional searches on open source platforms or paid data aggregator sites and potentially gain access to additional PII such as residential addresses," Flashpoint researchers said.
