From the Praetorian Guard of Rome to Swiss Guard mercenaries of nobility to the armies of white collar advisors and defenders of today, financial institutions and wealthy families expend vast resources protecting their wealth. In this edition of the ThreatShare CISO Advisor, we examine cybersecurity risks facing the Family Office segment of the Financial Services sector and the operational steps CISOs can take to manage these risks.
A Family Office (FO) is a private wealth management advisory company, or a dedicated unit within a larger institution, serving ultra-high-net-worth individuals and their families. With more than 3,100 Family Offices in North America and average AUM (Assets Under Management) greater than $1B, these entities are high-value, soft targets.
Our scenario begins with a CEO of a mid-sized Multi-Family Office (MFO). Alarmed by rising deepfake-enabled attacks using voice cloning for wire fraud, vendor impersonation, high-fidelity video for identity proofing [1-11), the CEO has sent an RFI (Request for Information) to their MSSP (Managed Security Services Provider) seeking a briefing in one-week on current threats and recommended countermeasures. The CISO for the MSSP will direct the response.
Findings for our hypothetical MSSP include real data collected and analyzed using an ensemble of GenAI assistants and agents following the ThreatShare AIA (Awareness, Impact, Action) model, designed to guide recommendations that inform:
- Awareness. More than 40% of Family Offices (FO) have experienced a cyberattack within the past two years [6].
- Impact. Consolidated findings on sector threat landscape indicate ~17% experienced financial loss; ~2% material loss [7].
- Action. Development of a playbook for: 1) continuous monitoring of the internet, dark web, and social media, 2) continuous, adaptive training for all personnel on social-engineering and deepfake threats, 3) strategic and tactical use of GenAI assistants and agents to keep pace with evolving adversary tradecraft.
Bottom line:
- In a survey of more than 140 Family Offices (Nov 2024 – March 2025): cybersecurity ranked as the top operational concern, 48% reported phishing, 26% reported a family-member breach, and 2% reported ransomware [7].
- Close to 90% of North American FOs outsource cybersecurity functions to specialist providers/MSSPs, reflecting lean teams and third-party dependence [7].
- Family Offices are cautious about adopting GenAI due to concerns about data security and privacy, and prefer leveraging partner provided capabilities [8].
Aon’s October 2025 Risk Management Survey frames the challenge – “the scale and complexity of cyber risk today is unlike anything we’ve seen before” [11].
Awareness: Sector Overview
The ThreatShare CISO Advisor series demonstrates human-in-the-loop cyber threat intelligence (CTI) using an ensemble of GenAI assistants and agents. Human analysts curated sources, verified citations, and cross-checked model outputs before inclusion. Our ThreatShare.ai CISO Advisor instance adds two controls: (1) curated, FO-relevant sources and (2) inline source-link verification.
Sector Scope and Structure
The FO sector spans multiple segments by size, geography, and operating model. The sector includes:
- Large and diversified Institutions offering wealth management, asset management, private banking, and custody services.
- Boutique managers focused on specialized strategies or niches.
- Single-Family Offices (SFOs), serving one ultra-high-net-worth family.
- Multi-Family Offices (MFOs), serve multiple families, pooling assets for access and scale.
- Virtual Family Offices (VFOs), networks of independent professionals (legal, accounting, cybersecurity, physical security) collaborating to provide FO services.
Figure 1 shows an example of market research from our custom implementation of ChatGPT Pro, ThreatShare.ai CISO Advisor, highlighting custom curation of authoritative source data, and source-link verification to make it easier for users to verify results and avoid citation drift.
Threat Landscape
Family Offices face a diverse and growing set of adversaries including cybercriminal syndicates, nation-states, and insiders. While risks span physical and cyber threats, the Campden Wealth 2025 Family Office Report ranks cyber as the most urgent threat to Family Offices [7].
Within FO environments, the most common and consequential risks are:
- Phishing, social engineering and BEC (Business Email Compromise), including deepfake voice/videoimpersonation; attackers using GenAI to create and translate phishing emails and lure pages, voice and image cloning, and negotiation scripting.
- Identity, SaaS abuse, Web Application (e.g., client portals) vulnerabilities.
- Third-party/supply-chain exposures; MSSPs, fintech, travel/concierge/custodian platforms.
- Data theft, extortion, and ransomware.
Figure 2 shows our ThreatShare Research Agent prototype summarizing prevalent threats across financial services sector.
Impact: Risks and Damages
Impacts to Family Offices are severe, varied, and tangible. They include financial loss, data loss, operational disruption, and regulatory/insurance exposure. Highlights:
- Financial Loss: Brightside AI estimates a weighted average $2.53M loss when an executive clicks a phishing link [19]. FO takeaway – Key roles (principals, CFOs, EAs, IT admins) require phishing-resistant MFA, call-back verification, and payment controls.
- Data Loss: A Proofpoint global survey of 1,600 CISOs finds that two-thirds of CISOs experienced material data loss in the past year. Insider-driven incidents are the leading cause of data loss. Human behavior is a critical vulnerability and susceptible to social engineering attacks. GenAI is seen as a double-edged sword. More than sixty percent of CISOs cite data loss via GenAI chatbots as a top security threat, while also listing safe GenAI as a top priority [20]. FO takeaway – Fund initiatives for DLP (Data Loss Prevention), insider-risk analytics, and GenAI usage policies.
- Operational Disruption: Reuters reports BMO Financial Group (top-10 North American bank with a wealth management unit) blocks 150k–200k sophisticated phishing attempts per month, with volumes “only going up [13]”. FO takeaway – Anticipate spike in malicious domain name registrations impersonating FOs and service providers.
- Regulatory/insurance exposure: Moody’s 2025 Cyber Survey of nearly 2,000 enterprises reports that with insufficient AI governance leading to data breaches, regulatory penalties, and loss of competitive advantage, cyber risk is a growing priority among insurance and asset management firms. Yet only 44% of Financial Services companies are following guidance for the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) Top 10 for Large Language Model (LLM) Applications [12]. Moody’s recommends prioritizing AI governance to reduce risks. FO takeaway – Implement LLM security controls (prompt/output logging, PII redaction, model allowlists, human-in-the-loop) before expanding GenAI use.
Summary: For Family Offices, phishing/BEC and identity-driven abuse results in direct losses. Adversarial AI will increase the volume and danger of phishing lures. AI governance gaps, insurance gaps, and legal exposures amplify the downside. FOs need to anticipate these risks and invest in solutions to counter these threats.
Action: CISO Response
Scenario recap. The MSSP’s CISO must answer a Family Office client’s RFI with specific, near-term actions to counter cybersecurity and GenAI-enabled deception threats. For illustrative purposes, the recommendations emphasize two tracks:
- Track 1 – Proactive Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) to blunt phishing, brand impersonation, and initial access.
- Track 2 – GenAI assistants and agents to accelerate CTI OSINT sharing.
Track 1 – Proactive CTI and Domain Impersonation Defense: With phishing cited as the top threat and 48% of North American Family Offices [7], early detection of impersonation domains materially reduces successful lures.
The CISO’s analyst team develops a capability demonstration using the MSSP’s DNS monitoring tool, in this case DomainTools, to monitor new domain registrations (within last 30 days) that resemble FO/wealth brands or IT systems used by FO teams, and scored as suspicious or malicious by machine learning classifiers (risk score > 80).
As shown in Figure 3, detections from this system can be shared with other systems for:
- Prevention: email security and DNS/firewall blocklists.
- Remediation: initiate takedowns with registrars/hosting providers and coordinate with law enforcement for criminal infrastructure.
- Threat hunting: use this domain intelligence to prioritize threat hunt investigations.
Track 2 – GenAI assistants and agents to accelerate CTI OSINT sharing. GenAI is a force multiplier for both attackers and defenders. Defenders need assisted aggregation and enrichment of threat data to shorten time from intel to detection.
In Figure 4 we see partial results of ~200 IOCs consolidated from five OSINT reports, enriched with context, and ready for download (see Table 1 for export formats) that were sourced using our ThreatShare.ai CISO Advisor assistant. The GenAI assistant can also auto-generate detection/hunting queries for SIEM, EDR, NDR, and Splunk to accelerate deployment.
In addition to the examples above, the MSSP brief will also recommend:
- Proactive monitoring of dark web and social media. Threat actors build personalized target profiles collected from the surface and social web, and share information on targets, data leaks, and victims in the dark web. The CISO will recommend solutions for continuously monitoring dark web forums/markets, breach dumps, and social platforms for brand, executive, and family references. SOCRadar and Blackbird.AI are two of many solutions with these capabilities.
- Personalized and insider-awareness protocols for the human layer. Human behavior remains the critical vulnerability. Family Offices blend corporate and personal spheres. Examples of training topics could include: role-based training for executives, family members, and personal staff; emergency protocols, wire/payments, credential changes, out-of-band verification, privileged access use, travel security; GenAI-crafted simulations that mirror current lure themes and deepfake scenarios. Vetted providers include Proofpoint, ESET, Immersive Labs, Hoxhunt, KnowBe4, Cofense, and others.
- Core cybersecurity stack (integrated, MSSP-operated): Selected layers may cover: EDR/MDR/XDR for endpoint visibility and rapid containment; Email and phishing protection with brand-spoofing and look-alike detection; Network/edge security; CTI platform; Identity security; Cloud security; Data security to guard against GenAI-related data egress.
- ·Guardrails for enterprise GenAI use: Selected topics may include: HR, admin, and AI policies; controls for AI, API-based prompting; Testing including red-team prompts and model data leakage.
Wrap-up: The issues raised in this post demonstrate cybersecurity’s evolving relationship with risk management. Moody’s recent risk management survey reveals a dramatic increase in the visibility and authority of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) at the board and C-suite level [12]. This shift is driven by multiple factors, including GenAI and digital transformation initiatives, increases in both the frequency and financial impact of cyberattacks, and intensifying regulatory and legal scrutiny. In 2025, 28% of CISOs now report directly to the CEO or CFO, up from 15% in 2023, while reporting to traditional IT or security roles dropped from 59% to 47%. This shows that cybersecurity is no longer viewed as just a technical or IT function, but as a business-critical risk discipline that demands executive oversight and strategic integration.
Editor’s Notes
This post was conceived, researched, drafted, reviewed, and approved by human cybersecurity analysts. We used ThreatShare.ai Cyber Researcher, ChatGPT, Google Gemini AI, Anthropic Claude, Anthropic Sonnet, Manus, and Perplexity as GenAI assistants for brainstorming, research, summarization, entity extraction, transformation and enrichment, script and code generation, proofreading, and editorial assistance.
References
- Omega Systems – Cyber Threats Facing Family Offices – Why Trust Is the Real Risk, 27-Aug-2025
- Forbes – The 7 Cyber Security Trends Of 2026 That Everyone Must Be Ready For 26-Sept-2025
- Crisis24 – A Unique Target: Understanding Why Cyberattacks on Ultra-High-Net-Worth Families are More Common, 23-July-2025
- V-Comply – Family Offices: Navigating Compliance and Regulatory Requirements, 10-July-2025
- Global Guardian – Family Office Safety: 5 Current Risk Factors, 10-Oct-2024
- Deloitte – The Family Office Cybersecurity Report, 2024
- Campden Wealth / AITi Tiedemann Global – 2025 Family Office Operational Excellence Report
- The National Law Review – Why the Family Office of the Future Needs Refreshed Operating Models, 2-June-2025
- RSM – Latest RSM research shows growing cybersecurity risk for Family Offices , 27-Sept-2024
- Dentons Survey Report – The Evolving Risk Landscape for Family Offices, May 2024.
- Aon plc – Findings from Aon’s Global Risk Management Survey, Tenth Edition, 2-Oct-2025
- Moody’s – Moody’s 2025 Cyber Survey, 1-Oct-2025
- Reuters – A REUTERS INVESTIGATION We set out to craft the perfect phishing scam. Major AI chatbots were happy to help, 15-Sept-2025
- SWFI (Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute) – 1,076 Family Office Profiles by Region, as of 2-Oct-2025
- Simple – andsimple.co – Family Office Directory
- Fox Family Office Exchange – https://archive.familyoffice.com/fox-wealth-center
- Hubbis (HK) Limited – Guarding the Vault: Why Cybersecurity is Becoming a Core Priority for UHNW Families and Their Advisers, 29-April-2025
- Institutional Investor LLC – Family Offices Are Unprepared for Cyber Threats, 27-Feb-2025
- SC Magazine – The high cost of being visible: How executive data fuels Fortune 500 phishing risks, 24-Sept, 2025
- Proofpoint – Proofpoint’s 2025 Voice of the CISO Report Reveals Heightened AI Risk, Record CISO Burnout, and the Persistent People Problem in Cybersecurity, 26-Aug-2025
- Help Net Security- Ransomware groups are multiplying, raising the stakes for defenders, 26-Sept-2025
- OpenAI – Disrupting malicious uses of AI: an update, 7-Oct-2025
- NYTimes – Chinese Hackers Said to Target U.S. Law Firms Chinese Hackers Said to Target U.S. Law Firms, 7-Oct-2025
- Google Mandiant – Another BRICKSTORM: Stealthy Backdoor Enabling Espionage into Tech and Legal Sectors, 24-Sept-2025