Identify who needs protection —
before something happens

Most organizations don’t think about personal safety until after a crisis.

A team member gets harassed. Someone’s home address shows up online. A staffer becomes the target of coordinated abuse. Suddenly, leadership is scrambling to respond — often without clear visibility into what data is exposed or how risk escalates.

At Brightlines, we help employers get ahead of this by understanding how risk actually works in today’s digital environment.

When organizations ask us who on their team needs protection, we look at three overlapping factors:

Impact + Likelihood + Attack surface

Together, these help leaders prioritize support in a thoughtful, defensible way.

Impact: Who is most vulnerable if something goes wrong?

Some employees face greater real-world consequences when their personal information is exposed. This includes team members who are:

• Women, nonbinary, or LGBTQ 

• POC, or from historically marginalized communities

• Immigrants or children of immigrants

• Disabled or chronically ill

• Living at the intersections of multiple identities

For these individuals, exposure can lead to stalking, harassment, employment disruption, family risk, or physical safety concerns.

Risk isn’t evenly distributed across your workforce. The same incident can have dramatically different outcomes depending on who it affects.

Likelihood: Who is more likely to become a target?

Risk also increases when someone becomes publicly visible. We see elevated targeting among employees who:

• Speak to the press or testify publicly

• Hold leadership or decision-making roles

• Work in advocacy, policy, or regulated industries

• Are named in lawsuits or high-profile matters

• Represent organizational positions during controversial moments

• Participate in activism or visible volunteer work

Importantly, people don’t have to be famous to be targeted. They just need to become identifiable. Once a name is attached to a narrative, attention can escalate quickly, often through people-search sites and coordinated online behavior. This is why proactive protection matters. Threats build over time.

Attack Surface: Who simply has more data exposed?

This is the category most organizations overlook. Many mid-career professionals — especially those who own property, have moved frequently, have long employment histories, have families or dependents and/or have accumulated decades of digital accounts carry a much larger digital footprint.

Unlike their parent’s generation, most, if not all, of their public records have been digitized. Their addresses, relatives, and phone numbers appear across dozens of government databases. Their information is readily available through hundreds of unregulated data brokers and public-record aggregators.

Even without controversy, these employees often have the largest attack surface — and therefore require less effort to target. They also tend to have more at stake.

Putting it together: a practical framework for employers

Brightlines typically supports employees who fall into one or more of these categories:

• Public-facing or soon-to-be public-facing staff

• Leaders and visible decision-makers

• Employees facing identity-based risk

• Staff in high-stress or controversial roles

• Individuals with large digital footprints

• Anyone who expresses concern or requests additional support

Rather than relying on titles alone, we help organizations evaluate exposure holistically — combining identity risk, role-based visibility, and underlying data presence.

Yet, many organizations decide to extend protection across their entire team. That’s because risk moves: When one employee’s exposure increases, colleagues with less visibility can become secondary targets. And when higher-profile employees become more secure – through data removal and monitoring – attackers frequently look for easier entry points, elevating the risk for others.

Protecting your teammates protects your organization

Protecting your people isn’t just about security – it’s about retention, trust, and duty-of-care.

Brightlines provides comprehensive discovery of employee data exposure, human-led risk analysis, mitigation, and ongoing monitoring to help organizations reduce harm before it escalates.

We don’t just remove data. We help you understand where risk lives, how it evolves, and how to support your team over time. Because safety at work doesn’t stop at the office door.