Alternate investment firms have their own unique security challenges. After all, your customers are high-net-worth individuals, and they trust you completely with their data. Any breach of your IT environment would expose a motherload of sensitive information about large sums of capital, and because of that, investment firms are attractive to criminals who are looking for a quick route to big money. 

It shouldn’t be shocking then to learn that according to a recent study, financial service firms are more than 300 times more likely to be the focus of cyberattacks than any other industry company. Moreover, those attacks cost their victims more than in other sectors due to the large amounts of wealth for which they’re responsible.

In these ever changing digital times, wealth managers have a critical need to adopt strategic approaches to their risk management and take seriously the threats they face from cyber criminals. Attackers are getting more sophisticated by the week, and you need to be a leader in the field with a reputation of protecting your customer assets. Here are some trends we’ve noticed recently:

#1: Phishing attempts are getting more targeted, more successful, and much more lucrative

Phishing attacks accounted for more than a third of data breaches last year, and the amount of revenue gained by criminals in phishing attacks increased by almost 120%. 

Email phishing attempts are becoming better targeted and more convincing than previous years and are also becoming more challenging for email security gateways to detect. 

#2: Criminals are targeting individuals more personally

Automated tools are becoming more common with criminal organizations, and they’re using them to scan social media platforms and other internet sites to glean information about their victims. They’re becoming pros at socially engineering atttacks based on travel, family photos, and other information that can be used for a well-timed phising attack. 

Financial service firms should be training their staff to not reveal sensitive imformation about their personal lives on social media lest they become targets. 

#3: Attacks are increasing at the nation-state level 

State sponsored cyberattacks have gotten more sophisticated and are disruption operations of more verticals than ever. They’re seeking to disrupt business operations and goverments by focusing their attacks on critical infrastructures like the financial sector. 

They’re well resourced and very professional, so they’re able to evade most modern security controls you have in place. Because they’re operating on a 24/7 basis, your firm simply must have around the clock monitoring in place. 

#4: Selling and sharing information is the new standard

The Dark Web doesn’t have standard indexing with search engines, so it’s hard to guage the exact volume of activity, but we do know that marketplaces for stolen financial and personal information have exploded in recent years. It’s very easy for potential criminals to purchase exploit kits so they can quickly launch ransomware attacks even without the technical experience. Yikes.

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