Stop Giving CEOs Full Access: You're Engineering a Single Point of Catastrophic Failure

In modern organisations, access control is often shaped by hierarchy rather than threat modelling. Senior executives, particularly CEOs, are routinely granted broad, persistent administrative access across systems. The intention is speed. The outcome is risk concentration. This is not a theoretical concern. It is a structural weakness that continues to appear in real-world breaches. The CEO is not just another user. From an attacker's perspective, the CEO is a high-leverage identity. When that identity is compromised, the attacker does not need to escalate privileges. The privileges are already there. The CEO as an Attack Surface, Not Just a Role Security teams tend to focus on infrastructure, endpoints, and external threats. What is often underestimated is identity as an attack surface. The CEO's identity combines several characteristics that make it uniquely attractive: Public visibility: names, emails, and communication patterns are easy to discover High trust: requests from the CEO