Family offices have become a preferred target for ransomware and cyber extortion for reasons that are straightforward. They hold significant assets. They are often less well-defended than the institutional asset managers and banks that sophisticated threat actors have historically targeted. And they frequently hold data — on beneficiaries, on assets, on legal structures — that is exceptionally sensitive and therefore valuable as leverage.

The frequency of attacks on family offices has increased materially over the past three years. The sophistication has also increased: many attacks now involve extended periods of reconnaissance before any destructive action is taken, allowing attackers to identify the most sensitive data and the individuals most likely to approve a payment.

Why IT controls are necessary but not sufficient

The typical response to the ransomware threat is to invest in cybersecurity controls: endpoint protection, multi-factor authentication, email security, backup systems. These are all necessary. They are not sufficient, for a simple reason: no set of controls eliminates the possibility of a successful attack. The question is not only how to prevent an attack, but what happens when — not if — one succeeds.

Operational resilience is the discipline that answers the second question. It covers the plans, processes, and tested capabilities that allow an organisation to continue operating — or to recover to an acceptable operational state — when a disruption occurs. For a family office, the disruptions that matter most are those that affect the ability to trade, to meet liquidity needs, to communicate with beneficiaries and counterparties, and to maintain accurate records of positions and transactions.

What a resilience plan needs to address

A family office operational resilience plan for a ransomware scenario needs to address several distinct challenges:

  • Communication — if email systems are compromised, how do the Principal, the COO, and key counterparties communicate? Who has the out-of-band contact details for the office's custodians, prime brokers, and legal advisers?
  • Trading continuity — if the OMS or trading infrastructure is unavailable, can the office place orders through an alternative channel? Who has the authorisation and the knowledge to do so?
  • Data recovery — how recent are the backups? Where are they stored? How long does restoration take, and has that been tested? Offline or air-gapped backups are essential: backups that are accessible from the compromised network may also be compromised.
  • Decision authority — who is authorised to make decisions during an incident, including decisions about whether to pay a ransom? That decision should be made before an incident occurs, not during one.
  • External support — which incident response firm will be engaged? Is there an existing relationship, or will you be calling cold during an active attack?

"The family offices that recover quickly from ransomware attacks are not the ones with the best cybersecurity. They are the ones with a plan that has been tested."

The testing requirement

A resilience plan that has not been tested is a document, not a capability. The value of a plan is in the exercise of it: finding the gaps, the assumptions that do not hold, the dependencies that are not documented. An annual tabletop exercise — walking through a specific incident scenario with the relevant people in the room — is the minimum.

For the most operationally critical functions, a technical test — actually restoring systems from backup, actually executing a trade through the manual backup process — is necessary to establish that the capability exists and the people who need to use it know how. These tests are disruptive. They are also the only way to know whether the plan works.

Where to start

For most family offices, the starting point is an honest assessment of current resilience posture: what plans exist, whether they are current, whether they have been tested, and where the critical gaps are. This assessment typically surfaces three or four high-priority gaps that, if addressed, would materially improve the office's ability to respond to a significant disruption.

Caelion's disaster and continuity work begins with this assessment and produces a prioritised remediation plan — not a comprehensive framework that takes two years to implement, but a set of targeted improvements that address the most significant risks first. For a family office with no existing plan, the most important thing is to have something tested and operational, rather than something comprehensive and theoretical.