Hacking People – Cybersecurity, Reputations and AI

The author of this article writes that most people are largely unaware of how their information can be used against them. And that’s probably a good thing, but the reality is that there are countless scams, extortion schemes, types of cyber attacks, and more are being invented all the time.

The following article is by Mykolas Rambus, of Hush (more about the author below). This is the third in a series that also appears in the Family Wealth Report Family Office Cybersecurity and AI Summit.” The editors of this news service are pleased to share this material; the usual editorial disclaimers apply. To respond, please email [email protected].

I have spent over a decade researching the world’s wealthiest people and their families – people are open books. Unless they take steps to be actively private, it is highly likely that everything about them, their families, their businesses and their service providers is public.

Hush’s experience stems from the fact that the founders of the Wealth-X company were targeted by criminal parties, such as intelligence agencies, oligarchies and organized crime.

It turns out that even publicly available information, which many people, including the wealthy and ultra-high net worth, think is harmless, is in fact extremely valuable, sensitive and sometimes deadly, as in the case of Forbes’ former Russia editor-in-chief.

Most people are largely unaware of how their information can be used against them. And that’s probably a good thing, but the reality is that there are countless scams, extortion schemes, types of cyber attacks, and more are being invented all the time.

“It’s easier to hack a human than a computer”

Yes, the Internet was designed for the free flow of information, speed, and in many cases anonymity. But those same virtues have enabled widespread cybercrime.

In fact, the sum of all cybercrime is greater than the entire illegal drug trade. This is because cybercrime is increasingly easy to commit, rarely prosecuted, and carries relatively little risk compared to drugs, weapons, and other illegal activities.

Take SIM swapping for example: a shockingly simple crime that requires just a few pieces of information to impersonate an individual, take over someone’s mobile phone and steal their bank or investment account funds.

Even burglaries are driven by a lack of privacy: 80 percent of thieves research their targets’ homes and residents online before committing a crime.

“No one knows exactly how he or she will react if he or she, or even a family member, is threatened.”

Online harassment has also reached epidemic proportions, with two-thirds of young people reporting that they have experienced such problems, and a quarter of those reporting that the harassment was violent in nature. No one really knows how they will react if they, or a family member, is threatened.

Once again, we see that privacy, or the lack thereof, is the problem. More than 90 percent of cyberattacks targeting individuals, family offices, and corporations begin with social engineering—and the first step of social engineering is reconnaissance—where hackers learn as much as possible about their intended targets, whether it’s the company’s CFO, a teenage relative, or an accounts payable clerk.

This issue of human exploration comes up again when assessing cases of extortion, and in particular a variant called virtual kidnapping. It is made possible entirely by lax privacy, cheap speech processing tools, just as is the case with sextortion, a crime that is actively being scaled up by criminal gangs around the world.

Combining all the risks discussed so far is impersonation. Depending on the position, influence, and relationships of the affected individual, the impact can be extraordinary. Unfortunately, generative AI is rapidly increasing the risk of impersonation, driven by a variety of motives.

Key Presentation Takeaways

1. People are the targets of today’s cybercrime, not systems

2. Adversaries conduct deep reconnaissance on families and their employees to find financial opportunities and psychological weaknesses and find their way into secured systems

3. There are many steps family offices can take to protect privacy, but being aware and actively not oversharing are key

About the author

Mykolas Rambus is the CEO and co-founder of Hush, the AI ​​cybersecurity and privacy platform for companies and their employees. Before Hush, Mykolas was an executive at credit bureau and data broker Equifax, co-founder of Wealth-X, the world’s largest database of information on wealthy people, and led IT at Forbes Magazine and real estate company WP Carey. He is an award-winning technologist who began his career launching a tech startup out of his dorm room at MIT.

Company Profile

Hush is the AI ​​cyberprivacy service that reduces social engineering and phishing risks for family offices and their employees. Hush empowers family members by finding everything the internet knows about them, informing them of their vulnerabilities, and making it easy to reduce their targetable information with one click. By combining AI-guided detection and removal, Hush is the most comprehensive privacy defense against cyber, financial, physical, impersonation, and reputational threats. Hush has won multiple awards including from Google, WealthBriefing, is SOC2 certified, and is a “top cybersecurity company to watch.” Learn more at gohush.com.