High-net-worth executives and their families face growing threats from cybercriminals, but corporate IT often stops at the office door. Now, Richter is offering a new service designed to protect clients from online threats, fraud, impersonation and other cyber risks.

Known as Richter Guardian, the service provides personalized protection against online fraud, impersonation, compromised credentials and other cyberthreats that can fall outside the scope of corporate IT.

“I started to get a lot of calls on Friday afternoons before long weekends with people experiencing some cybersecurity issue or a fraud or something to that effect,” Raymond Vankrimpen, partner and cybersecurity expert at Richter, told PeopleNX during an interview.

“It dawned on me that we should create a solution that was filling the gap that was missing from corporate IT.”

The service, which comes in three tiers, provides a “white-glove” approach to protecting high-profile or higher-risk senior executives from a range of cyberthreats.

“What I was seeing is that a lot of (cybersecurity) organizations were doing one or the other. Very few were doing both. Some were not really doing it with a high degree of white-glove service. Meaning they developed some app and then you were self-managing yourself on the app with respect to security, and I said that’s not good enough for these clients,” Vankrimpen said.

Service offers personalized experience

Many of the individuals are older, Vankrimpen said, making a more personalized approach particularly important.

“They need the patience of somebody who understands the technology, who understands the ever-changing landscape that is the internet, and to help guide them, whether they’re making a purchase transaction and they’re not sure about it, or they’re getting emails about deals that look too good to be true, things like that.”

As well, threats include someone discovering a leaked password of a bank or financial institution, which is increasingly common.

“It’s not that hard for a fraudster or cybercriminal to really find out where those compromised credentials are. They can pick them up through open-source intelligence or on the dark web,” Vankrimpen said.

Impersonation of high-net-worth execs

One of the potentially most damaging threats is online impersonation, which recently targeted an executive who was not yet a Richter Guardian client.

“Someone was purporting to be this individual, and we believe it was a pretext to further phishing and other attacks but they were trying to weasel themselves into that person’s social sphere via social media. This person actually wasn’t a client of Richter Guardian at the time but they approached us, and we said: ‘Okay, we can help you out.’”

“We got them on our platform, and we were able to have that offending impersonation taken down within two days,” Vankrimpen said.

The service is “geared towards corporate executives who have elevated risk, and also towards high net-worth families who are being further targeted because of their wealth and access.”

And often, cybercriminals target family members as a way to reach executives. “What we’re finding with, on the executive front, is if I’m a smart fraudster and I want to get into the CFO or the CEO of a bank, I’m going to find out who the family members are and I’m going to target them because they’re probably not very well protected.”

“Corporate IT doesn’t typically protect these individuals, and nor do they want to.”

Different service levels provided

Richter Guardian offers three levels of protection for a family of four:

• Signature at $5,000 per year;
• Prestige at $7,000 per year; and
• Sovereign at $10,000 per year.

The first level offers basic protection and access to cybersecurity professionals. It also offers real-time monitoring of online personas, device and home network protection, including intervention if a breach happens.

Prestige “includes that social media impersonation and takedown coverage, and I would say we’ve got probably the majority on that middle tier because oftentimes they are involved with charities and stuff like that,” Vankrimpen said, necessitating protection due to high-profile activities.

Sovereign level offers more protection for “unique needs,” he explained, as well as an annual digital threat assessment for the whole family and custom training, among other offerings.

New dangers from AI tools

The cybersecurity landscape is also likely to become more complicated as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more accessible to cybercriminals., according to Vankrimpen. “It’s not at scale yet. I think that’s coming.”

It is able to create things such as deepfake images and personas but just the way AI operates is troubling for cybersecurity professionals.

“The gathering of information about an individual has become a lot quicker. Where it used to take hours and hours to do, now you can have it done in minutes,” he said.

For Richter, while the AI threat is real, the good guys can also soon use various AI methods to detect deepfakes and the like.

“I’m really passionate about bringing the technology to the people in a way that’s easy to use and will help them to navigate the scary world that’s out there right now,” Vankrimpen said.

About Richter

Richter was founded in Montreal in 1926 and today describes itself as a “business family office providing strategic advice on business matters and on families’ financial and personal objectives across generations,” according to its website.

It also provides financial planning, accounting, tax services and charitable-giving advice. The firm also has a business advice arm.