Data Privacy Week 2026: Why Employee Data Privacy = Cybersecurity

Data Privacy Week should be more than a gimmick for companies to brag about their latest certifications. For a growing number of businesses, it’s a time to examine the intersection between employee data privacy and cybersecurity. 

These two disciplines can’t function in isolation. Your employees’ online exposure can seriously hurt your attempts to protect your systems from attacks. It’s not enough to set protections on company devices, either. The best way to protect your systems is by protecting your people. 

BYOD is a top cybersecurity risk in 2026

Why is employee exposure such a serious risk for enterprises? It all starts with bring your own device (BYOD) policies. The vast majority of security breaches originate on unprotected personal devices. These incidents begin when attackers weaponize personal data to launch highly targeted scams, phishing, and social engineering attacks via email and messaging apps..

Most companies and CISOs are well aware of the limitations of their enterprise cybersecurity programs. You can protect your employees’ company-issued devices, but their personal devices are often up for grabs to the first threat actor that comes along due to lack of oversight. 

Unfortunately, many employees still use those devices to log into sensitive systems. Nearly four in five employees have used a personal device for work, irrespective of company BYOD policies. 

Despite widespread awareness of this fact, far too little is being done to defend against the serious threat presented. 

Employee exposure increases your attackable surface

The widespread exposure of personally identifiable information (PII) online is a leading factor in why employee-owned devices are targeted by cyberthreats. Popular data broker sites make this information alarmingly easy for anyone to obtain. 

Data brokers aggressively harvest personal details about individuals from thousands of global sources and assemble that information into comprehensive dossiers. A profile can include many data points, often including but not limited to:

• Current home address
• Previous addresses
• Age and birth date
• Phone number
• Email address
• Relatives
• Employment status and place of work
• Criminal record

That information is up for grabs for anyone willing to pay. In a standard initial scan, DeleteMe identifies an average of 420 exposed data points per user on data broker sites. The exposure and stakes are significantly higher for employees in public-facing roles–executives, spokespeople and other presenters. With greater exposure comes greater risk. 

This level exposure makes the vast majority of your employees easy targets for cybercriminals. Not only can threat actors obtain a phone number or email address to initiate a phishing attack, but other information like relatives and place of work will make it easier to impersonate trusted sources and engage in social engineering. 

Watch for these types of attacks in 2026

The proliferation of personal information readily available online, combined with AI and other technologies, makes it easier than ever to initiate complex attacks. This is why DeleteMe expects a significant uptick in many types of cyber threats aimed at businesses this year, especially threats that start with employees and compromised access. 

1. Expect more pretexting and impersonation threats

Pretexting is a tactic used in social engineering. It often starts with a fake scenario and impersonation, both of which are easier to develop convincingly based on exposed PII and with the help of generative AI. In addition, through spoofing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks, pretexting can appear to come from a legitimate source. 

For example, let’s say you get an email in your inbox from a manager in your company asking for urgent help. The manager has lost access to a system and needs to regain it in the next 30 minutes in order to be able to close an important deal. That email offers a pretext for why the sender needs login information for the system, hence the term ‘pretexting.’

Another example is a text seemingly from IT saying one of your accounts has already been compromised and warning that you need to reset your password immediately. When you click on the link in the text to reset your password, you have no idea that you’re actually helping a cybercriminal gain access. 

Whatever the scenario is, the goal is to gain trust, establish authority, or create urgency. The results can be serious, allowing unauthorized access into essential systems or to confidential information. Worse still, while it used to be easy to recognize pretexting due to poor grammar, spelling errors, and other obvious issues, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have made this much more challenging today. Anyone can now use an AI chatbot to create a convincing pretext campaign with zero errors. 

Last year already saw a number of attacks initiated through pretexting. In April, Marks & Spencer, a retailer, was forced to halt all orders after a cyber attack. Cybercriminals claiming to be an employee reached out to a third-party vendor that had access to the company’s systems, claiming a need to reset access credentials. From there, the attackers, later learned to be associated with the ransomware-as-a-service group Scattered Spider, gained access to other connected systems. 

One of the best ways to defend against this is to reduce your attackable surface and ensure these cybercriminals have less information to work from when impersonating a colleague or attempting to target a personal device. In addition, companies should perform regular training to make sure employees are aware of the risks of pretexting and can guard against even the most error-free social engineering messages. 

2. Expect more convincing deepfakes

A deepfake uses AI to impersonate the actual voice or appearance of an employee, executive, customer, or vendor. As with pretexting, the goal is typically to gain access to lower-security systems and then spread out to confidential or high-security systems. 

Today, deepfakes often enable voice phishing, or vishing. Voice phishing involves attackers sending voice messages or calling directly to try to get access to systems or commit fraud for financial gain. 

This trend is only getting worse, with vishing surging by as much as 442 percent year over year. The attacks range from email-based to phone-based or even meeting-based. Threat actors can now engineer a fake meeting with deepfaked company execs to encourage employees to transfer money, or they can simply call a personal phone number found on a data broker site. 

These attacks are particularly dangerous because the threat actors sound and look like trusted sources. Some measures you can take to protect your teams include: 

1. Training your employees to be cautious of answering calls from unknown numbers or offering any sensitive information over the phone. 
2. Reducing the exposure of personal details like phone numbers and emails to reduce your attackable surface.
3. Establishing trusted communication channels that don’t rely on email. 

Failing to protect your employees from these types of attacks can cost your company millions of dollars, break trust, and hurt your reputation. 

3. Expect more personal threats and extortion attacks

These types of more personal threats take several forms, but some of the most common are sextortion, deepfake extortion schemes, and re-extortion. Threats of physical harm are also becoming more common. 

Sextortion begins with cybercriminals obtaining compromising images or data about an individual or executive within the organization, often through romance scams. The threat actors can use that information to extort money, or they can use it to convince employees to become insider threats and harm the organization. Deepfake extortion schemes are often similar in that they involve compromising images, but those images are fake. 

Re-extortion starts after a breach has already occurred. Once threat actors gain access to certain data, they can later contact victims directly with new demands. When this happens, it’s important to ensure victims know the threats may not even be true. 

For example, let’s say an employee gets an email claiming personal data has been stolen and the hacker proves it by sharing the individual’s name, home address, phone number, and other PII. Who is to say that information didn’t come from data brokers or was already exposed on the dark web, rather than being connected to a current breach? Paying to protect the data may not prevent further exposure. 

Finally, threats of physical harm have become a part of some ransomware attacks. A report from cybersecurity firm Semperis revealed two in five execs received threats of physical harm during a ransom demand after an attack. Those threats may even target personal devices. In some cases, attackers referenced personal or familial details likely obtained through data broker sites. 

These types of attacks are just a few of the many reasons why protecting your people is a necessary part of protecting your systems and your company from threats. 

The 2026 strategy: privacy as a security control

This is the year to move beyond “box-checking” compliance. PII removal is increasingly becoming a security control with real ROI in both security and productivity. 

Adopting privacy as a benefit helps employees clean up their digital footprint by removing their home addresses, phone numbers, and family details from data broker sites, and enables CISOs to keep their organizations more secure. By proactively reducing the personal data available to attackers, you are effectively:

Prioritizing employee data privacy = protecting your systems

• Starving the AI: Generative AI tools used by hackers require “fuel” (PII) to create convincing deepfakes and pretexting scripts. Less data means less convincing attacks.
• Hardening the human element: Employees who feel their personal safety is a corporate priority are more likely to stay vigilant against social engineering and participate in a proactive security culture. Employees who are hacked can’t work. 
• Reducing attack surface: By eliminating the “bread crumbs” that lead from a personal social media account to a sensitive corporate login, you break the chain of a multi-stage breach before it even begins.

Data privacy week is important because it allows you to take stock of whether you’re prioritizing the security, safety, and privacy of your employees adequately in 2026. As long as human error remains the top cause of breaches and cybercriminals continue to exploit personal information exposed online, data privacy will continue to be an essential component of any cybersecurity program. 

Learn more: 

• Worried about employee risks this year? DeleteMe’s partners can now use our Risk Scan feature to identify the most at-risk employees and executives. 
• Learn how to protect executives against personal threats
• Learn how to create an effective security awareness training program