Private family offices may look like small businesses on paper. In reality, many carry the exposure of a regulated institution: concentrated wealth, sensitive personal data, direct access to decision-makers, and operational dependence on a very small team. Deloitte’s 2024 Family Office Cybersecurity Report found that 43% of family offices globally had experienced a cyberattack in the previous 12 to 24 months, and 25% had experienced three or more attacks.
Picture a London-based private family office on a normal weekday. The principals are flying from Singapore to New York. The PA is in Mayfair clearing email, arranging catering, booking a last-minute stop in Dubai, and forwarding investment papers to a lawyer in Geneva. Somewhere between the airport lounge and the office, a phishing email slips through. The PA’s email account is taken over, and the attacker starts to study the inbox. Within minutes, they can see travel plans, draft payment instructions, advisor details, and the office’s approval patterns.
The attacker does not need to breach a bank. They only need one believable payment request, one fake document share, or one well-timed message to an under-pressure advisor. From there, privacy, money, and reputation can all go at once.
That is why single and multi-family private offices for high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth families have become prime cyber and privacy targets. The combination is hard to ignore: concentrated wealth, sensitive personal data, lean staffing, cross-border coordination, and lots of out-of-hours decision-making.
Privacy, cybersecurity, and uptime are not the same thing
A modern private office is rarely one office in one city. It follows the family across London, Zurich, Geneva, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and other wealth hubs. It moves across time zones, relies on external advisers, and handles decisions that often will not wait until morning.
Privacy, cybersecurity, and uptime sit together, but they are not the same problem. Privacy is about who can see what. Cybersecurity is about stopping unauthorised access and spotting it quickly. Uptime is about whether the office can still function when email, file access, connectivity, home technology, or a core platform fails.
In a private office, these three risks are tied together. A PA booking complex travel needs access to private data, secure logins across multiple systems, and reliable connectivity while people are moving between countries. A Head of Office approving an urgent transfer late at night needs strong identity checks, clear confidentiality boundaries, and systems that do not fall over at the worst moment.
If all of that is treated as ordinary “IT”, the real issue is missed. A PA arranging travel, a finance lead approving a transfer, and a principal working from a residence all need privacy boundaries, secure access, and reliable systems at the same time.
Why family offices are being hit harder
Attackers have worked out that family offices can hold the sort of information and access that used to sit behind larger institutional walls. They can hold detailed asset data, personal records, legal correspondence, travel patterns, property information, trust structures, and direct lines to decision-makers.
They also tend to run lean. Deloitte found that while 85% of family offices report using strong passwords or multi-factor authentication and 72% report using data backups, only 58% provide cybersecurity staff training, 34% conduct maturity assessments, 50% do not have a disaster recovery plan, and 68% have not adopted know-your-vendor protocols. Those gaps are especially dangerous in a private-office setting because attackers can exploit informal process, trusted relationships, and urgent decision-making at the same time.
Phishing remains one of the biggest entry points. WealthBriefing reported that phishing and malware are the most common forms of attack in family offices, and that 93% of family offices that had been attacked said those incidents involved phishing emails. In this setting, phishing is shaped around hierarchy, urgency, travel, and trust.
The most common external threats are familiar, but the family-office context makes them especially dangerous:
- Phishing and business email compromise. A staff member clicks a fake link, enters credentials, or trusts a convincing email, and the attacker uses the account to redirect payments or extract sensitive material.
- Account takeover. An attacker gets into a principal’s, PA’s, or finance lead’s account and quietly reads, forwards, downloads, or impersonates from inside a real mailbox.
- Ransomware. Systems are encrypted, data may be stolen first, and the office is left dealing with both downtime and blackmail.
- Deepfakes and impersonation. A fake voice note or call arrives at exactly the moment the office is under pressure and asks for an urgent transfer, disclosure, or exception to process.
- Third-party breaches. A travel platform, lawyer, administrator, or cloud service is compromised, and family data leaks through someone else’s control failure.
The same pattern appears inside the office:
- Legacy tools. Old servers, poorly patched laptops, unmanaged phones, and forgotten admin accounts create openings that should not exist anymore.
- Over-trusted access. Long-serving staff often accumulate broad permissions because it feels efficient, and those permissions are not always reviewed when roles shift.
- Shadow IT. Staff use consumer file-sharing, informal messaging, or one-off travel and booking tools because the job needs to get done, but no one has checked the risk properly.
This is the part many offices still miss. A private office can carry systemic exposure more like a mid-sized financial institution: a single breach can affect liquidity, confidentiality, legal position, travel security, and family trust at the same time.
What institutional-grade protection actually means
For a private office, institutional-grade protection does not mean buying every tool on the market or creating a mini bank in-house. It means setting a defined minimum standard across identity, access, monitoring, backup, recovery, vendor control, and incident response, then running that standard consistently.
Remote first is not enough
A suitable MSP for a private office needs strong remote capability and the ability to put senior engineers on site when the situation demands it.
The remote side is the baseline. Cardonet’s managed IT services emphasise 24/7 service desk cover and ongoing monitoring. For a private office, that matters because problems often surface when a principal is boarding, a payment window is closing, or the person who “usually knows” is asleep.
If something serious happens, your IT partner needs to work quietly and effectively on site in London, Zurich, Geneva, New York, Singapore, Dubai, or a family location that is not shown on a public office map. If it cannot, the office is not properly covered.
For an IT partner, the opportunity is not to replace the private office’s judgement. It is to make good judgement easier to act on: clear access rules, tested recovery paths, monitored systems, and a service model that can respond when the family’s working pattern does not fit office hours.
What Cardonet can own, and what the office must keep
A specialist IT partner such as Cardonet can help a private office reach an institutional-grade standard without building a full internal IT and security department. The office should still keep the decisions that are cultural, personal, and hierarchical, while the IT partner runs the technical disciplines consistently.
That split is healthy. The private office should not be running modern cyber operations with informal tools and a best-efforts mindset. The IT partner should not be deciding family boundaries, visibility rules, or internal politics.
Good protection should not feel theatrical
Many private offices worry that serious cyber and privacy controls will turn daily life into a fortress. Too many prompts. Too many approvals. Too much visible process.
That is usually a sign that the controls have been bolted on badly.
Well-run protection should feel calm. Staff should know where to work, how to share, what to question, and who to call. Principals should be able to travel, redirect plans, and make urgent decisions without wondering whether the systems will hold or whether the wrong person is seeing the wrong thing.
That is the standard worth aiming for: not flashy tooling or fear-driven policy, but a defined operating model that protects privacy, blocks common attacks, restores cleanly, and still lets a small office move at the speed the family expects.
A gap left unaddressed here does not stay static. The same lean team structure that makes protection hard to build also makes a single incident harder to absorb once it happens, which is why the earlier this standard is set, the less it costs to hold.
Cardonet has spent over two decades building institutional-grade IT and security standards for organisations that carry more risk than their size suggests, private offices included.
A short, no-obligation review of where your office currently stands against these disciplines is usually the most useful first step. It is worth a conversation before assuming everything is covered.
This is part 1 of a 4-part series on how MSPs like Cardonet can support the private offices of high-net-worth families and individuals. In this first article, I deal with the big picture first: why private offices have become prime targets globally, why “small team” does not mean “small risk”, and why the right support model needs both strong remote capability and the ability to get senior engineers on-site fast when something goes wrong.
In part 2, I look at privacy and confidentiality in the real world. Not abstract policy. The messy reality of inboxes, messaging apps, travel data, family assistants, advisors and shared devices, and how private offices can get control of that without turning daily life into a compliance exercise.
Part 3 focuses on uptime and resilience. That means the practical side of keeping a private office running across time zones, travel schedules and urgent decisions, with the right backups, failover, disaster recovery and 24/7 support in place before there is a problem.
Part 4 closes the series by looking at governance and succession: how the technical, privacy, and continuity foundations built across this series need to change hands deliberately as family leadership shifts, covering documented system ownership, phased access handovers, and where an MSP fits without deciding who holds authority next.
FAQs
1. Why are family offices such attractive targets for cyber attacks?
They combine concentrated wealth, sensitive personal data, and lean internal teams. That gap between exposure and formal protection is exactly what attackers look for.
2. What does institutional-grade protection look like for a small private office?
It means a defined minimum standard for identity, access, monitoring, backup, recovery, vendor control, and incident response, run consistently rather than informally. The office stays small and agile, but the controls behave more like a disciplined institution.
3. How should a family office think about privacy, cybersecurity, and uptime?
Privacy is about who can see what, cybersecurity is about who can get in, and uptime is about whether the office can still function when systems fail. They overlap, but they should not be treated as the same problem.
4. Why is remote-only IT support not enough for a private office?
Some incidents are too sensitive or too tied to physical environments to handle safely from a distance. A serious IT Partner model needs strong remote capability and the option to put senior engineers on site when needed.
5. What can Cardonet take off the private office’s plate?
Cardonet can run identity and access management, secure collaboration, logging, monitoring, backup and recovery discipline, vendor checks, and genuine 24/7 support. The office keeps control of hierarchy, visibility, and risk appetite.
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