Single- & multi-family offices
The first hour decides whether the money comes back — and whether the family's name stays out of it.
HackFirstAid walks your team through it in plain language — no jargon, no enterprise security tax, and no regulator to hide behind. Just the controls, the training, and the calm first hour a lean office actually needs.
NDA by default. We never name clients, publish logos, or hold your family's data.
The exemption is the exposure
No regulator requires you to have any of this. That is exactly why your insurer, your bank, and your counterparties now ask.
A qualifying single-family office is excluded from the Investment Advisers Act entirely — no registration, no examinations, no cyber requirements. The exclusion is the point of the structure. It also means no external force ever obliges the office to build controls, and most principals have never been asked to decide.
See which rules actually reach you- The wire the counterparty needs by 2pm that you can no longer trust.
- The principal who will not adopt MFA.
- The family name that cannot appear in a breach headline.
The market has reset
This is a family-office problem now — not a generic IT problem.
43% / 57% / 62%
of family offices were attacked in the last 12–24 months — 57% in North America, 62% above $1B AUM (Deloitte).
US$25.6M
wired across 15 transfers after an AI-generated deepfake video call — the Arup case, the anatomy of a family-office attack.
641,000
records claimed in the Pathstone breach — where the family's privacy itself became the ransom.
~31%
of family offices still operate without any cyber incident-response plan (Deloitte).
First-hour playbooks
Written for a family office, not a bank or a clinic.
Wire-transfer fraud & deepfake principal impersonation
A capital call, distribution, closing, or “principal's urgent instruction” is spoofed — by email compromise, a lookalike domain, or an Arup-style deepfake of the principal or CFO.
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Business email compromise on the office
The quieter precursor: a compromised office mailbox, malicious forwarding rules harvesting wire threads and K-1s, a spoofed custodian notice, or fake “updated wire instructions” mid-deal.
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Family exposure-footprint & doxxing response
The uniquely family-office scenario: home addresses, travel patterns, aircraft tail numbers, children's schools, and household-staff identities assembled from data brokers, property records, and flight trackers.
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Ransomware & data-theft extortion on the office
The Pathstone pattern: the office's own systems — or its wealth platform — are encrypted or exfiltrated, and the extortion leverage is the family's privacy, not operational downtime.
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Principal & family-member account takeover
A principal's personal email, iCloud/Google account, or social login is taken over — often via SIM-swap or reused credentials — giving the attacker password resets, private photos, and a launchpad into the office.
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Vendor & advisor-chain breach
The breach isn't yours — it's your accountant, lawyer, fund administrator, bill-pay provider, or wealth platform. Their compromise exposes your K-1s, wire instructions, and family data.
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Household-staff & estate-network compromise
The estate is a small enterprise: shared Wi-Fi, smart-home systems, security cameras, and personal devices of household staff — often flat, unmanaged, and bridged straight to family devices.
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Insider misuse & departing-employee risk
A trusted employee, advisor, or departing staff member copies files, keeps access, or misuses standing credentials — the small-team family office has few people but enormous concentrated access.
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Targeted phishing & social engineering
Spear-phishing and pretexting aimed squarely at the office: fake DocuSign, spoofed custodian portals, “IT support” calls, and QR-code lures crafted from public information about the family.
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NextGen social exposure
The next generation lives online: geotagged posts, school and travel details, and oversharing that maps the family's movements, wealth, and relationships for attackers and doxxers.
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Cyber insurance & law-enforcement response
After an incident, the claim and the report are their own minefield: policy sub-limits, notification deadlines, preserving evidence for law enforcement, and knowing which agency to call and when.
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Travel & border device security
The family and staff travel constantly: devices at border crossings, hotel and airport Wi-Fi, lost or seized laptops, and the elevated targeting that comes with visible wealth abroad.
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Why offices trust us
Discretion as a design principle
We do not name clients, publish logos, or announce relationships — ever. Engagements are under NDA by default.
No data custody
We never hold the family's financial data, documents, or credentials. Advisory, training, and incident response only.
CIS v8.1 + insurer alignment
A demonstrable reasonable-security baseline mapped to what HNW carriers and crime/fidelity underwriters actually ask.
Principal-ready everything
Every deliverable produces a one-page plain-language summary. We make the COO look in command.
We know the stack
Wealth platforms, custodian portals, bill-pay, deal rooms, and estate networks — the systems a family office actually runs.
Anonymized, operationally specific
Real outcomes, no logo wall — every case study is anonymized down to the office size and the control that worked. See the “From the first hour” outcomes below.
From the first hour
What the first hour actually looks like — anonymized.
Every example is anonymized: no names, no logos, only the office size and the control that changed the outcome.
$1.8M wire, stopped
A two-person finance team at a $600M single-family office caught a spoofed “principal instruction” with a 40-second callback to a number stored beforehand. The wire never left.
Deepfake call, refused
A CFO on a video call with what looked like the principal was asked to release a closing wire. The pre-agreed passphrase was missing — so the release was held, and the impersonation surfaced within the hour.
Mailbox breach, contained
Hidden auto-forward rules were quietly harvesting wire threads inside an office mailbox. We reset access, killed the rules, and warned the counterparties before a single fraudulent instruction landed.
Family footprint, removed
A principal's home address, aircraft tail number, and children's school had been assembled across data brokers. A family-scale removal program pulled the reconnaissance map back offline.
Every engagement is run personally by Travis Barlow — 25+ years in incident response, 580+ engagements, founder of AtlSecCon, one of Canada's longest-running security conferences. You hire a person you can diligence, not a logo you have to trust.
Free resources
Two things worth printing before you need them.
The office's biggest vulnerability is the principal's iPhone; the family's biggest financial exposure is the office's wire desk.
That's why the Household program and Data Broker Removal aren't cross-sells here — they're the second half of the threat model, and they're included with every paid plan.
Upgrade — vCISO
A CISO for the family and the office — one accountable owner.
Training gets your people ready and advisory is there when something breaks. When you need someone to own the program — protecting the principal, the family, and the office from targeted fraud and wealth-transfer risk, and being the name your banks, wealth managers, insurers, and household staff can point to — that's the HackFirstAid vCISO: a security leader on retainer.
The archetype we're built for: impersonation or deepfake-driven wire fraud aimed at the principal's household or the office's transfers.
We own your program
Strategy, risk register, roadmap, governance, cadenced reviews, and the banks, wealth managers, insurers, and household staff conversations.
Independent partners execute
DFIR, SOC, pen-testing, tooling, legal, brokerage — coordinated by your vCISO, never sold by us.
Billed annually. Every tier includes a named vCISO, a 90-day on-ramp, and household coverage.
The HackFirstAid family
One cyber-readiness stack. Twelve audiences.
You run a family office. HackFirstAid also covers the principals and their households, the businesses, medical practices, and law firms the family relies on, the municipality and schools around them, the pension plans that pay their people, the boards, executives, and IT teams behind them all, and the Household portal that protects everyone under your roof.