CSC's CISO survey moves social media impersonation to the top of the three-year list

Walt Fry, senior director of technology for domains at CSC, writes on CircleID from CSC’s CISO Outlook 2026, a survey of 300 senior security executives split across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Asked what they faced in 2025, respondents ranked domain and DNS hijacking and subdomain takeover first, cybersquatting second, ransomware and malware third. Asked about the next three years, social media impersonation and defamation moved to first, pushing domain and DNS hijacking to second and cybersquatting to fourth; DDoS and executive impersonation including deepfakes complete the top five. On AI-enabled incidents, 75% expect slightly more than in 2025 and 14% expect significantly more. None expected fewer.

Fry’s structural claim is that these are one campaign rather than four categories: a fake profile or a cloned advertisement establishes credibility and creates urgency, and a lookalike domain is where the fraud, the counterfeit sale or the credential theft actually completes.

That is the voice-side pattern with the channels swapped. A spoofed call establishes urgency and a payment rail completes it; the call is not the fraud, it is the introduction. Reading the two together is the point of having both datasets — CSC is measuring the web-and-social entry path, the carrier and analytics vendors measure the voice one, and neither publishes the other half.

CSC sells domain security and brand protection services, and the threat that rose to the top of its three-year list is the one its product line is expanding to cover. The survey also measures what CISOs expect rather than what has happened, which is a measure of attention.