Targeted social engineering is rising, personalized and multi-channel, and straining enterprise defenses. In Optery’s 2026 Enterprise Social Engineering Survey, 96% of cybersecurity leaders reported an increase in targeted social engineering attacks, and nearly 75% said their organizations had experienced credential compromise as a result. Respondents ranked data broker and people-search sites as the most significant source of attacker intelligence, ahead of social media and breach data.
Publicly available PII and professional information fuels phishing, smishing, vishing, business email compromise, credential theft, account takeover, and physical threats.
Removing exposed employee personal information minimizes the intelligence threat actors can use to identify targets, map relationships, impersonate trusted people, and develop personalized pretexts.
For organizations seeking to reduce their data broker exposure, choosing the right personal data removal platform requires more than comparing price or counting the number of data brokers on a vendor’s website.
Download A Security Professional’s Guide to Choosing the Right Personal Data Removal Software to learn what security and privacy teams should consider when evaluating providers.