Just a few decades ago, finding out where a high-profile executive lived, worked, ate, or traveled took weeks of dedicated effort. Today, it takes seconds with a smartphone to track a private jet by its tail number, or to access open-source data that reveals a home address, family members’ names, political donations, and property records.

In short, the threat landscape has fundamentally changed. CEOs can no longer hide in obscurity — yet too many organizations are still running an executive protection (EP) model built for the 1990s. Boards and executive teams must modernize now, moving beyond a solely reactive bodyguard approach to a comprehensive security infrastructure that layers sophisticated intelligence technology on top of a physical protector.

Executive Protection in a Simpler World

The old model of executive protection centered around a physically imposing bodyguard standing over an executive’s shoulder. It succeeded because threats were localized and physical. The protection perimeter was small, perhaps a fifteen- or twenty-foot circle. Bodyguards could read the room and identify suspicious people.

The bodyguard playbook worked well for an era in which public information was limited, social media was non-existent and malicious actors had to invest significant effort to locate targets. Eventually, however, that era ended, making the model insufficient and leaving executives vulnerable to new threats.

The Inflection Point

The landscape has changed for myriad reasons. First and foremost amongst them is the availability of information. Executives are geotagged, photographed and tracked in real time. Flight-tracking sites, open-source intelligence (OSINT), data mining and public records make privacy nearly impossible. No longer rooted to a home computer, threat actors can get minute-to-minute location updates on their smartphones, allowing them to shadow movements and coordinate in real time from anywhere in the world.

At the same time, online radicalization has increased the number of individuals seeking attention or ideological retribution. Fringe groups that once struggled to gather 10 people in person can now connect 10,000 online, driving each other toward more extreme action. Anonymity online reduces the risk of accountability for issuing threats or spreading incitement, while social media algorithms amplify grievance-driven content and normalize toxic rhetoric.

Finally, modern executives must be visible. Through social media, cable news, press releases, and other platforms, today’s CEOs must operate in the public arena to promote their companies and engage in the policy conversations that could make or break them. They are known in ways their predecessors never were, increasing their threat profile.

What leaders fail to recognize is that executive protection shields not only individuals but the organization’s entire brand.

How to Modernize Executive Protection

A new model is needed for a new era of executive protection that transitions from the bodyguard mindset to an intelligence-driven infrastructure. It rests on four principles.

1. Security must be truly 360-degree and always on. Rather than an 8-hour shift while an executive is traveling or out to dinner, it must function as 24/7 infrastructure. The single agent watching a 5-meter perimeter must be augmented by layered monitoring across physical, digital and geopolitical domains.
2. Intelligence must be proactive rather than reactive. Protection must shift from ‘stand and react’ to ‘project forward,’ leveraging OSINT, cyber tools, social media monitoring, and dark web surveillance to identify threats before they materialize. For example, a dedicated intelligence team or third-party risk monitoring firm can monitor social media chatter around climate protests targeting private jet usage or scan dark web forums where doxxed executive addresses have surfaced.
3. Threat assessment must be disciplined. Extremism online means that threats have proliferated, but many amount to empty bravado rather than legitimate dangers. Threatening accounts can be investigated based on account origin, context, posting history, proximity to the executive, criminal background, and mental health indicators.
4. Response infrastructure must be integrated across domains of expertise. Replace the lone agent with an organizational capability — one that includes a GSOC (Global Security Operations Center), analysts, law enforcement liaison, air ambulance coordination, and an EP team that can be activated in layers.

As any Chief Security Officer (CSO) knows, the hardest part isn’t building the program, it’s justifying it to a board of directors or executive team that wants to see clear return on investment. Protection costs money without serving as a revenue driver. In the best-case scenario, nothing happens and everyone stays safe, making the value difficult to prove.

What leaders fail to recognize is that executive protection shields not only individuals but the organization’s entire brand. An attack on an executive has wide-ranging implications for an organization’s operations, stock price, morale, and identity. Markets react instantly to leadership instability. Employees question safety and continuity and competitors exploit uncertainty.

Rather than trying to justify protection by what hasn’t happened, frame executive protection as enterprise risk management. Just as organizations invest in cybersecurity to prevent breaches or in compliance teams to avoid regulatory penalties, they must invest in infrastructure that mitigates leadership risk.

The threat landscape has changed. Today’s connectivity, anonymity, and radicalization pipeline makes the old model not just outdated, but dangerous.

Protection today requires infrastructure as sophisticated as the dangers we now face — one that continuously monitors, projects forward, and scales response when needed. While a terrible tragedy can justify a 21st-century security program, building one proactively can prevent tragedy in the first place.