The real security risks facing high-net-worth individuals in 2026 are digital, and wealthy households already know it. Chubb's December 2025 wealth survey found that cybersecurity has overtaken healthcare and pandemics as affluent North Americans' top concern, with identity theft and cyberbullying named as the specific worries driving that shift. Yet only 41% of those same respondents carry a standalone cyber insurance policy, and insurance was never built to stop a deepfake phone call or an aggregated data broker profile in the first place. Business email compromise cost victims more than 3 billion dollars in 2025 according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, and California's data broker registry counted more than 575 active brokers by February 2026, most requiring no notification before publishing a home address or a family member's name.
Key Takeaways
- Chubb's December 2025 wealth survey found cybersecurity has become the top concern among affluent North Americans, ahead of healthcare and pandemics, yet only 41% carry a standalone cyber insurance policy.
- California's data broker registry counted more than 575 active brokers by February 2026, up from 459 in June 2025, and most publish home addresses and family details without any notification requirement.
- Business email compromise cost victims more than 3 billion dollars in 2025, and total cybercrime losses reported to the FBI reached 20.8 billion dollars, a 26% increase over the prior year.
- Traditional identity fraud losses held near 27.3 billion dollars in 2025, but 64% of fraud professionals surveyed by Javelin now name AI-generated deepfakes as the top emerging threat.
- Batten Black's six-domain assessment maps digital, financial, residential, and family exposure together, because a data broker listing and an unprotected wire transfer protocol are rarely separate problems for the same household.
Most wealth risk surveys ask about art collections, weather damage, and liability lawsuits. Those are real financial risks, and a family with a serious collection or multiple properties should address them. But they describe the concerns of a slower-moving era, before a name, a home address, and a net worth estimate could be assembled from public sources in an afternoon.
The risks that actually cost wealthy families money today look different. They involve a spoofed email from someone who sounds exactly like a business partner, a voice on a phone call that sounds exactly like a spouse, and a home address that was never supposed to be public but shows up on a dozen people-search sites anyway. None of this requires a hacker breaking through a firewall. It requires patience, publicly available information, and a target worth the effort.
If your public profile has grown, whether through a liquidity event, a board seat, a property purchase, or simple visibility over time, you are already more exposed than the standard risk survey accounts for. The question is not whether that exposure exists. It is whether anyone is actively managing it.
What Affluent Households Say They Fear, and Where Protection Falls Short
Chubb's most recent wealth survey, published in December 2025, found that cybersecurity has overtaken healthcare and pandemics as the top concern among affluent North Americans. Within that category, identity theft and cyberbullying rank as the specific worries driving the shift, ahead of the property and liability risks that used to top these surveys every year.
The concern is not misplaced. What's missing is the response. Only 41% of the same respondents carry a standalone cyber insurance policy, and even a policy that pays out after a breach does nothing to stop a deepfake phone call from authorizing a wire transfer or a data broker from publishing a home address in the first place. Insurance responds to losses. It was never built to reduce exposure before a loss happens.
That gap between naming a risk and actually reducing it is where most high-net-worth households sit today. Select a risk area below to see where a typical insurance or wealth-management response stops, and where a coordinated security response has to pick up.
Nowhere is that gap wider than in digital exposure and identity fraud, the two categories now driving both the awareness shift and the actual dollar losses. The figures below are current as of 2026, and they explain why a coordinated response, not another insurance line, is the mechanism this problem actually requires.
The Fastest-Growing Risk: Digital Exposure, Identity Fraud, and AI-Enabled Attacks
California's data broker registry, run by the California Privacy Protection Agency, counted more than 575 active brokers as of February 2026, up from 459 just eight months earlier. Each broker aggregates property records, court filings, and marketing data into a searchable profile that typically includes a home address, phone number, and the names of family members. Most operate with no requirement to notify the person whose data they are publishing.
A newer state platform called DROP, live since January 2026, lets California residents send one deletion request to every registered broker at once, and brokers must begin honoring those requests by August 1, 2026. It is a genuine improvement, but it only reaches brokers who bothered to register. Public interest research group EPIC found that at least 33 California-registered brokers reported selling or sharing data with foreign governments, including China and North Korea, in 2025, a detail no consumer opt-out request can undo after the fact.
Business email compromise, the practice of impersonating an executive, an attorney, or a title company to redirect a wire transfer, cost victims more than 3 billion dollars in 2025 according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. Total cybercrime losses reported to the IC3 reached 20.8 billion dollars for the year, a 26% increase over 2024, and the bureau tracked AI-related fraud as its own category for the first time, logging more than 890 million dollars in losses tied specifically to AI-generated content. The mechanism rarely involves breaking into anything. A convincing email, timed around a real transaction like a property closing or an advisor introduction, is usually enough.
Deepfake fraud has moved from novelty to routine threat inside two years. Ponemon Institute research commissioned by BlackCloak found that 42% of surveyed organizations report their executives or board members have already been targeted by a fake image or video, and separate Ponemon findings show the share of executives with a home address, mobile number, or personal email exposed in the past two years has reached 57%. A widely reported 2024 case saw a finance employee at a global engineering firm wire 25 million dollars after a video call with what turned out to be deepfaked colleagues, a reminder that the technology already works well enough to fool trained professionals.
Traditional identity fraud losses held nearly flat at 27.3 billion dollars in 2025, according to Javelin Strategy & Research's 23rd annual study, but the composition of that fraud is shifting. New-account fraud victims jumped 31% year over year, and 64% of fraud and identity professionals surveyed for the same study now name AI-generated deepfakes as the top threat they expect to face next.
Families managing wealth through a family office or family business are not exempt. Deloitte Private's 2026 global survey of more than 1,500 family enterprises found that 74% had experienced at least one cyberattack in the past two years. Just 43% describe their cybersecurity strategy as fully reliable; the rest report meaningful gaps or no formal strategy at all, which is precisely the kind of gap a patient, well-resourced attacker is built to find.
This is the exact gap Batten Black was built to close. Where a wealth manager verifies a wire transfer and an insurance policy pays out after a breach, Batten Black assesses and reduces exposure across all six domains before an attacker finds the opening: digital security, privacy and data, identity and finance, residential, travel and mobility, and family and lifestyle. One named advisor coordinates the entire picture, rather than leaving a family to manage a data broker removal service, a cyber policy, and a home security vendor as three disconnected relationships.
If your public profile has grown in the past year, whether through a liquidity event, a new board seat, or simple visibility, a confidential assessment is the fastest way to see exactly what is exposed right now.
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Digital Exposure Doesn't Stay Digital
Digital exposure rarely stays contained to digital accounts. The same information that fuels a wire fraud attempt, an address, a travel pattern, a family member's name, also drives physical targeting.
Researchers at the University of North Carolina found that more than 75% of convicted burglars describe social media and tools like Google Street View as part of how they choose targets. The FBI issued warnings after organized crews used players' public game schedules and social media activity to time break-ins at their homes while they traveled for away games, a pattern security researchers say has since spread well beyond professional athletes to anyone whose absence from home becomes visible online.
Three details are usually enough for exposure to compound from digital to physical:
That is the residential and travel and mobility domains in practice. Neither piece is dangerous alone. Together they are enough to plan around. Family and lifestyle exposure follows the same pattern: none of this requires a household to stop living normally, it requires knowing what is visible and deciding, deliberately, what stays that way.
A data broker removal subscription or a stronger password manager addresses a slice of this picture, and tools like these, covered in more detail at battencyber.com, are a reasonable starting point for someone earlier in this journey. What they do not do is connect a home's access control to a family member's social media habits, or a travel calendar to a wire transfer protocol. That connective work, mapped across all six domains, is the part a single point solution was never designed to handle.
Why Batten Black Is Built for the Risks That Actually Cost You
Most security spending in this space follows the old survey model: address the risks that are easy to describe and insure, and hope the rest doesn't happen. Batten Black exists because that approach leaves the fastest-growing risks, data broker exposure, deepfake-enabled fraud, and the physical targeting that follows from both, completely unmanaged.
Batten Black's six-domain assessment starts by mapping exactly what is currently exposed: the data brokers already publishing your information, the wire transfer protocols that would or wouldn't catch an impersonation attempt, the public details a motivated actor could use against your family. One advisor owns that picture end to end, coordinating removal, monitoring, and hardening across every domain rather than leaving you to manage several separate vendors.
If your exposure has grown faster than your protection has, a confidential assessment will tell you exactly where you stand.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Security Risks for High-Net-Worth Individuals
These are the questions that come up most often once a family starts looking at their actual exposure, phrased the way people tend to type them.
What Are the Biggest Security Risks for High-Net-Worth Individuals Right Now?
Digital exposure and identity-based fraud lead the list. More than 575 data brokers were registered in California by February 2026, publishing addresses, phone numbers, and family details. Combined with AI-generated deepfakes and business email compromise, these expose wealthy individuals to targeted wire fraud and physical targeting that standard insurance-focused surveys rarely measure.
How Many Companies Actually Have My Personal Information?
California's data broker registry alone listed more than 575 active brokers as of February 2026, and industry estimates that include resellers put the true number well into the thousands nationwide. Most operate with no notification requirement, so removal starts with knowing which brokers hold your data in the first place.
Is Wire Fraud Really a Risk for Private Individuals, Not Just Companies?
Yes. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center report recorded over 20 billion dollars in losses, with business email compromise responsible for more than 3 billion of that total. Private individuals managing significant assets, especially during a property purchase or a wire transfer to an advisor, are frequent targets of the same impersonation tactics used against companies.
What Is Deepfake Fraud and How Does It Target Wealthy Families?
Deepfake fraud uses AI-generated audio or video to impersonate a trusted person, such as an executive, advisor, or family member, to authorize a payment or extract information. Ponemon Institute research commissioned by BlackCloak found 42% of surveyed organizations report their executives or board members have already been targeted by a fake image or video.
Does My Wealth Manager or Family Office Already Handle This?
Usually only a narrow slice. Wealth managers often focus on account verification and wire transfer protocols. Family offices increasingly manage cybersecurity too, yet Deloitte's 2026 survey found only 43% of family businesses worldwide describe their cybersecurity strategy as fully reliable, with the rest reporting meaningful gaps or no formal strategy.
Can I Remove My Information From Data Broker Sites Myself?
You can, but it is slow and rarely permanent. Each broker requires a separate opt-out request, and removed listings frequently reappear as brokers re-aggregate data from public records. California's new deletion platform, live since January 2026, streamlines requests for state-registered brokers but does not cover brokers operating outside that registry.
What Life Events Increase Security Risk for High-Net-Worth Individuals?
A liquidity event, public promotion, property purchase, or increase in media visibility typically triggers a spike in exposure. Each event adds new public records, press mentions, or filings that data brokers and researchers can aggregate quickly, often within days of the event becoming public.
Sources Used for This Article
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center: "2025 Internet Crime Report" - ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf
- Javelin Strategy & Research: "2026 Identity Fraud Study: The Illusion of Progress" - javelinstrategy.com/whitepapers/2026-identity-fraud-study-illusion-progress
- Deloitte Private: "Family Business Cybersecurity, 2026" - deloitte.com/global/en/services/deloitte-private/perspectives/family-business-cybersecurity.html
- IAPP: "CalPrivacy Unpacks DROP Updates on Consumer Participation, Upcoming Enforcement" - iapp.org/news/a/calprivacy-unpacks-drop-updates-on-consumer-participation-upcoming-enforcement
- BlackCloak: "BlackCloak Extends Deepfake Protection to the Executive's Entire Trusted Circle" - blackcloak.io/news-media/blackcloak-extends-deepfake-protection-to-the-executives-entire-trusted-circle
- Chubb: "Chubb 2025 Wealth Survey: The Resilient Mindset" - news.chubb.com/2025-12-03-Chubb-2025-Wealth-Survey-The-Resilient-Mindset
Related
- The Six Domains of Protection for High-Net-Worth Individuals: the companion piece mapping these risks to a full six-domain response.
- Doxxing Protection for Executives: how data broker exposure gets built into an operational dossier.
- Executive & Founder Security Advisory: how exposure changes the moment a liquidity event or public profile increase hits.
