37% of family offices have experienced a cyberattack. Not near-misses. Not phishing attempts caught by a spam filter. Actual breaches. Data accessed, systems compromised, and in some cases, funds moved — by people who had been inside the digital infrastructure for weeks before anyone noticed.
This is the statistic that the family office industry discusses behind closed doors and almost never publishes.
Because the clients it concerns do not want to think about it.
And that is precisely why it keeps happening.
The Architecture of Vulnerability
A family office holds the most concentrated repository of sensitive information available anywhere in the private sector.
Investment positions across multiple asset classes and jurisdictions. Legal structures, trust documents, and succession plans. Personal communications between principals and advisers. The travel schedules, the residential addresses, the biometric access credentials for properties and vehicles.
For a sophisticated adversary — state-level actors, organised crime groups, or the increasingly capable freelance dark web economy — a family office is not an incidental target. It is the target. The crown jewel. The single point of entry that, when compromised, yields more valuable intelligence than any other comparable system.
How the Attacks Actually Work in 2026
The phishing email is old news. Sophisticated adversaries have moved to techniques that the family office’s standard IT setup is not designed to detect.
Deepfake audio impersonating the principal. Synthesised video of the CFO instructing a wire transfer. AI-generated communications indistinguishable from the trusted adviser’s email pattern, sent from a domain registered one character differently from the real one.
The attack surface is not the technology. It is the trust.
Family offices operate on relationship trust — the assumption that the person calling is the person they claim to be, that the email is from the address it appears to be from. Adversaries have learned to exploit that trust with tools that generate convincing impersonation at a cost of almost nothing.
The Specific Risk Nobody Discusses
The most underappreciated attack vector in the UHNWI security landscape is not the digital one.
It is the personnel one.
The executive assistant. The household manager. The driver who has been with the family for eight years and knows the codes, the schedules, the relationships. Not because they are malicious — the overwhelming majority are not. But because they are human, and humans are the target of social engineering that sophisticated adversaries execute with patience and precision.
The family office that has invested in enterprise-grade cybersecurity and neglected personnel security has secured the vault while leaving the combination written on a card in the security guard’s pocket.
The Correct Response
Physical security, digital security, and personnel security are not three separate programmes.
They are one integrated threat model, requiring continuous review, independent auditing, and the kind of institutional discipline that the family offices which have been breached — almost universally — had not maintained.
The ultra-wealthy who fly private understand that aviation safety is not optional and not self-managed. The identical logic applies to their information environment.
At Hype Luxury, the discretion with which we manage client data — including movement schedules, which are among the most sensitive operational details in a security context — is not a courtesy.
It is a security commitment.
The most valuable asset in your family office is not the capital. It is the information about the capital.
