Cybersecurity has become one of the most pressing challenges facing family offices today. Given the concentration of wealth, sensitive information, and personal relationships they manage, family offices are increasingly attractive targets for cybercriminals. As artificial intelligence accelerates the sophistication and speed of cyberattacks, traditional security approaches are proving insufficient.
Drawing on the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid — “I sing of arms and the man” — cybersecurity expert Scott C. Fogarty argues that preserving wealth across generations requires more than simply passing assets down. It also requires actively protecting them. In today’s environment, family offices must view cybersecurity as a core responsibility rather than a technical afterthought.
Family offices are far more than administrative structures for managing wealth. They safeguard family capital, privacy, reputation, succession plans, philanthropic activities, and long-term legacy. This combination of valuable assets and trusted relationships makes them particularly vulnerable to cyber threats.
Too often, cybersecurity is still treated as an IT procurement issue. In reality, attackers are not just targeting systems; they are studying relationships, mapping networks of trust, and identifying weak points that can be exploited. A single compromised device or mistaken click can provide the foothold needed to move deeper into an organization’s ecosystem.
The threat is already significant. More than half of North American family offices have experienced a cyberattack within the past two years, while nearly a third still lack a formal incident response plan. At the same time, attackers can now move through networks in minutes, while many organizations remain reliant on security models that focus primarily on detecting and responding to threats after they occur.
The Limits of Detection-Based Security
For decades, cybersecurity has been built around a familiar approach: block known threats and detect suspicious activity once it enters the network. While technologies have evolved from firewalls and antivirus software to advanced monitoring platforms powered by AI, the underlying model remains largely reactive.
The problem is that by the time an attack is detected, the attacker may already have mapped the network, identified valuable assets, and established a position from which to launch further attacks. Detection systems can alert defenders, but they often do little to stop an attacker in real time.
For family offices, the challenge is amplified by the complexity of their environments. Cyber risk extends beyond office systems to include home networks, personal devices, vendors, travel devices, and household technology. This creates a broad attack surface that traditional security tools may not fully cover.
Furthermore, detection systems face a fundamental trade-off. Systems configured to identify more threats often generate large numbers of false alarms, while those tuned to reduce false positives may miss genuine attacks. As AI-powered attacks become faster and more adaptive, simply improving detection capabilities may no longer be enough.
The Convoy Principle
Fogarty compares today’s cybersecurity challenge to the Allied convoy strategy during World War II. Early in the Battle of the Atlantic, German U-boats were able to attack merchant ships with relative ease. The solution was not simply better observation of attacks, but a redesign of the environment itself. Merchant vessels were grouped into convoys protected by naval escorts, making attacks far riskier and more costly for the enemy.
According to Fogarty, cybersecurity has reached a similar turning point.
Rather than relying solely on monitoring and alerts, organizations should focus on reshaping the environment to make attacks more difficult and dangerous for adversaries. This means denying attackers reliable information, disrupting unauthorized movement, and imposing consequences as soon as hostile activity begins.
In other words, cybersecurity should shift from observation to control.
A New Standard for Family Offices
Family offices should evaluate cybersecurity measures based on a simple question: do they change the attacker’s behavior?
Controls that merely improve visibility or support compliance may still have value, but truly effective defenses are those that make reconnaissance risky, limit movement, and prevent attackers from operating freely inside a network.
This is ultimately a governance issue. Family office leaders do not need to become cybersecurity experts, but they should understand whether their security tools actively prevent attacks or simply report them after the fact. They should also ask what assets are covered, whether unmanaged devices are visible, and how quickly security controls can respond when suspicious activity occurs.
Conclusion
Protecting wealth across generations requires more than prudent investment and succession planning. In the AI era, it also demands a new approach to cybersecurity.
Family offices can no longer rely solely on defensive measures that react after an intrusion has occurred. Instead, they must adopt proactive security strategies that disrupt attacks before damage is done, raise the cost of hostile activity, and protect the continuity, privacy, and reputation entrusted to them.
As Fogarty argues, safeguarding a family’s legacy requires not only preserving assets but also defending them against an increasingly sophisticated digital threat landscape.
