Name: Why the Wealthy Are Hiring “Cyber Bodyguards”
Uploaded: 2025-10-29
Duration: 6 min 31 s

Artificial intelligence isn’t just transforming business — it’s fueling a new era of cybercrime. As a key U.S. cyber law expires, the country could be entering one of its most vulnerable cybersecurity moments. From billion-dollar corporate breaches to the rise of “concierge cybersecurity” for the wealthy, Fortune explains what’s driving the surge in digital attacks — and how both companies and individuals are defending their data, assets, and reputations in the age of AI.

Why the Wealthy Are Hiring “Cyber Bodyguards”

Artificial intelligence is fueling a new era of cybercrime. 

Tech

Artificial intelligence isn’t just transforming business — it’s fueling a new era of cybercrime. 

Artificial intelligence is helping to fuel a new era of cybercrime. Artificial intelligence is poised to rapidly accelerate the threat from online criminals. Now, as a key US cybersecurity law expires, experts say the country could be entering one of the most vulnerable moments in cybersecurity, as that risk. corporations are spending billions on digital defenses while wealthy individuals are turning to concierge-style cyber services. Here's an inside look at what's driving these digital attacks and how both institutions and high net worth families are scrambling to keep their data, assets, and reputations intact. Everything is connected. Everything's online, and that allows the attackers so many different areas to attack them. Anwar Visram is the co-founder of Hard Target, a concierge cybersecurity firm that protects high net worth families, athletes, and executives from digital threats. It's one of a growing number of personalized cybersecurity services that function like digital bodyguards. Our clients don't need another. Antivirus subscription. What they need is a digital protection detail. High profile hacks from Jeff Bezos' phone to the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates and Elon Musk have shown how exposed high net worth individuals can be to cyberattacks. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was targeted in an alleged phone hacking scheme conducted by Saudi Arabia. While larger companies are investing heavily in corporate cybersecurity, personal systems and home devices remain easier. Targets often unprotected and connected to dozens of other networks. I had one family come to me where they had experienced a complete digital compromise. That means their cell phones were compromised, their IOT or their, you know, smart TV, their computers, their online accounts. Everything was completely compromised. They even compromised the security cameras and the security system. Protection from attacks like these doesn't always come cheap. Cybersecurity concierge services can run anywhere from a few $1000 a year to more than $45,000 for individuals and up to $100,000 for businesses, depending on the level of coverage. Many people don't know how large their digital footprint is, and so the more there is about you, there is more information to them to try to compromise and exploit something within that footprint, Curtis Seuss, CEO of another firm called Concierge Cyber. says many clients don't seek help until after a breach has already happened. You have to presume that everyone today you've been compromised. How many times do we all get the letters indicating that you've been a victim of a data breach of a company? We're seeing all sorts of cyberattacks where that information is out there in the public domain, bad people using that information to then perpetuate physical attacks and or negative sentiment against an individual company or person. Many large organizations rely on cloud infrastructure and third party software, increasing the number of entry points for attackers. Experts say that this type of interconnectivity is driving a rise in cyberattacks. That same vulnerability played a key role in the recent cyberattack on cloud giant Salesforce, where a hacking group claimed to steal nearly a billion records from dozens of organizations. There was an application that connects to Salesforce, and unfortunately they suffer. An attack and that in turn created a vulnerability for all of the customers of this application. It creates this big spider web tangle of risk that is very important companies manage. Artificial intelligence is also rapidly changing the scale and sophistication of cybercrime. Just a couple of years ago, when we looked at the time it took from when they got in to when attackers were impacting an organization, it was about 9 or 10 days. In the past year we've seen that drop to under a day in terms of sophistication. It enables an attacker who may not otherwise know how to code to use vibe hacking essentially to be able to use ransomware where otherwise they may not have the sophistication. We're seeing a lot of these deepfakes, especially with business email compromise too, where the attackers, the intent is not to physically harm you but to steal your money. But cybersecurity firms are also using AI to stay ahead of attackers on Fortune's 2026 Cyber 60 list, which highlights the top. Center backed cybersecurity startups yet to go public. The number of AI-focused companies has doubled since last year. AI is a huge part of how we operate. At the end of the day, cybersecurity is a data problem, right? There's just so much information out there, and humans just don't have the capability to identify the signal and all that noise. But AI is actually really good at that. Experts say the motives behind these attacks vary widely from political sabotage. to financial gain. So the attacks today are multifaceted, right? So state sponsored actors are interested in intellectual property. A state sponsored actor may want to gain control of critical infrastructure so that if they perpetrate some type of an actual physical attack, they can divert the defending country with disrupting the critical infrastructure. Now a 2015 law that helped the US government guard against cyber threats recently expired. For the past decade, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, or CISA, has served as a key framework for the nation's cyber defenses. It granted legal protections that encouraged companies to share threat intelligence with the federal government and their peers. Cyber is really a global issue, and from US, it's every corporation, every person, every corporation, every entity. We're all on the same side of the wall, and our adversaries are on the other side. And the challenge with that wall is that the defender has to protect everything all the time. The adversary just needs one way in. It's truly important that everyone work together on the same side, and a big part of that is the information sharing, the collaboration, the cooperation amongst both private and public.