The HNW are targets

In the past, you may have thought about cybercrime targets as either large corporations or the proverbial senior citizen who fell victim to the “send money to the Nigerian prince”-style email scams. That’s changed, however. For starters, the banks and other big firms now have huge cybersecurity budgets and teams in place. So rather that target the big-money corporate world, criminals are increasingly targeting your clients—the affluent investors, individuals and families—with a growing amount of effort and sophistication. 

Action steps

To help advisors better assist their affluent clients with cybersecurity, Rosen offers four key action steps to make those clients aware of:

1. Protect key accounts. This is what Rosen calls basic cybersecurity hygiene. There are four main types of accounts that are most important to safeguard: social media, health-related account, financial-related accounts and email accounts. It’s extremely crucial to have the strongest possible passwords and multifactor authentication in place for these accounts, because they can yield the most exploitable data for criminals. In addition, Rosen recommends using an authenticator that gives you a code to log in, and that code changes every 15 seconds.
2. Protect your home network. As our homes become more digital, it creates more opportunities for data theft. The smart move here is to focus on the router. Routers and their ports are akin to your home’s doors and windows; they can be opened and closed for perfectly legitimate reasons but also for suspicious and nefarious reasons. Have a cybersecurity company run vulnerability tests on your router—and do so frequently, such as once a week, because Internet-connected appliances and other devices in the home can inadvertently open routers ports without you knowing they’ve done so.Rosen advises the best practice of setting up a separate guest network in your home. This essentially builds a wall between any malware or other dangerous items on the devices of people in your home from your main network.
3. Update your technology. When tech companies send out update notifications, pay attention and take action. These are often patches for a security problem or risk that the companies have discovered. The longer you wait to update your system, the more time you’re giving would-be criminals to get into your system or device through that hole. Also, install malware protection software. Most commercial-grade malware solutions offer reasonably strong protection against malware that can infect your system and give criminals access to information they can use against you.
4. Harden your own defenses. Technology can stop threats, but it can’t change human behavior. That’s why so many scams are designed to make us nervous or take fast action: The less we think rationally, the more likely we are to click on that link or scan that code that give cybercriminals access to our info. Rosen’s advice: If you receive a communication that immediately makes you feel nervous or scared, your first thought should be, “Is this a scam?”

Ultimately, one of the best ways to prevent cybercrime is to stay educated about scams.  That can be done easily—for example, by setting up a regular news search on Google for topics like high-net-worth cybersecurity fraud. When you have a better idea of how you’re likely to be targeted by criminals, you can potentially do a better job at taking a breath and stopping yourself before you take an action that could spell trouble for you.

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