Majority of Enterprises Hit by Executive Impersonation as C-Suite Becomes the Fastest-Growing Attack Surface
New data sampling 270 executives and 43,035 alerts shows attackers are bypassing enterprise defenses entirely, and most security programs have no coverage where the attacks actually land
Outtake today released the 2026 State of Executive Impersonation Report, the industry's first report detailing where, how, and why executives are getting impersonated online. Drawn from a sample of 40 thousand impersonation alerts observed across a sample of ~300 executives in 2025–2026 and corroborated against public industry data from the FBI, FTC, and Verizon DBIR, the research exposes a structural gap in enterprise security: the most public-facing people in an organization have become its most exploited attack surface, and the tools built to protect the traditional cybersecurity perimeter were never designed to account for this.
The headline number is harder to ignore than most security statistics: 53% of organizations had an executive or employee impersonated — more than half, according to Outtake's own 2026 Digital Risk Report. It is simultaneously one of the most common threat categories in enterprise security and yet, by the data, one of the least defended.
