I’ll be honest with you. For a long time, I thought of cybersecurity the way most people do: as something that lived inside corporate IT departments, behind firewalls and software policies, largely separate from the rest of life. I knew the basics. Don’t click suspicious links. Use a strong password. But beyond that, I assumed our family was reasonably protected.
Sitting down with Dr. Chris Pierson changed that. Chris is the founder and CEO of BlackCloak, the company behind the first Digital Executive Protection Platform, and he has spent 25 years at the intersection of cybersecurity, privacy law, and high-stakes financial risk. What he shared with me on the Wealth and Purpose Podcast was one of the most practically important conversations we have had on the show. Not because the threats are new, but because most families, including successful, sophisticated ones, have no idea how exposed they actually are.
You Are the Target
The first thing Chris made clear is that high-net-worth individuals and their families are not incidental targets for cybercriminals. They are the primary target. The reasoning is straightforward. A corporation might spend ten or twenty million dollars on cybersecurity infrastructure. Hacking one takes enormous resources and yields uncertain results. But targeting the family of the executive who runs that corporation? The financial upside is comparable, the security is far weaker, and the attack surface is enormous.
Chris described how a criminal can walk away with five, ten, or twenty million dollars by compromising a single family office or high-net-worth individual. And remember, as he put it, three million dollars of stolen American money has the purchasing power of something much larger in other parts of the world. The economics simply favor going after families over corporations. And yet most families operate with almost no protection at all.
The Home Is the New Battleground
The point of entry is almost never the office. It is the home. The personal Gmail account. The teenager’s laptop on the kitchen table. The router that nobody has thought about since it was installed. Chris told me that 40 percent of the clients who come to BlackCloak are already compromised before they even ask for help. The damage is already in motion before anyone knows to be concerned.
What made this land for me was the Gmail example. We tend to think of email as just a communication tool. But as Chris walked me through it, a personal email account is really a master key. Inside it, you will find correspondence with your attorney and your physician. Your calendar tells a criminal exactly when your home is empty and where you are going. Your contacts reveal everyone around you who might be used as leverage. Your linked accounts connect directly to financial institutions, airline bookings, and financial documents. One account, compromised once, opens nearly everything. And yet most people treat their personal email with almost no security at all because they figure they have nothing to hide.
The People Around You Are the Vulnerability
One of the most important things Chris said is that the risk is never just about you. It is about everyone in your orbit. Your spouse. Your children. Your aging parents. The executive assistant who has access to your calendar. The family member who shares your last name and posts freely on social media. Cybercriminals understand that families are interconnected, and they exploit that connectivity deliberately.
Children are a particularly soft target. They have large digital footprints, limited security training, and they are connecting constantly across apps, platforms, and devices. And it is not just their own information that is at risk. If a criminal can get into a child’s device, and that device is sitting on the same home network as everything else, they have a foothold into the entire household.
Our parents face a different kind of vulnerability. They were raised to answer the phone, to be polite to callers, to not hang up on someone who sounds official and urgent. Chris described how the people running these phone scams are often working from what amounts to forced labor operations in places like Myanmar, running scripts refined over decades. They know your parent’s name. They know their address. They know the last four digits of their account number. They trigger the part of the brain that moves from rational thinking into fear and urgency. And in that moment, money moves.
Three Things You Can Do Right Now
The conversation could have ended in helplessness, but Chris is a practical person and he came with answers. When it comes to protecting against scams targeting family members, especially older parents, he offered three steps. First, education ahead of time: show people what these calls and messages look like before they receive one, so they can recognize it when it happens. Second, slow down time: the only thing that interrupts the fight-or-flight response is a pause, and building the habit of pausing before acting is one of the most protective things a family can do. Third, have a guide: a trusted person who can be called in the moment to say, this doesn’t feel right, let’s wait.
On the structural side, Chris pointed to one free step that almost nobody takes: a credit freeze on all three major credit bureaus, Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. It takes about thirty minutes, it costs nothing, and it closes off one of the most common attack vectors available. You can unfreeze temporarily when you need to. But a freeze stops criminals from opening new credit in your name even if they have your Social Security number. He said if he could only recommend one thing, that would be it.
Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Everything
Toward the end of our conversation, we got into the part that unsettled me most. Artificial intelligence has not just improved cybercrime. It has industrialized it. What used to take a team of ten criminals working for a month can now be done by one person in a day. Reconnaissance, targeting, message crafting, and delivery have all been automated at scale. Criminals can now identify everyone who attended a high-profile event, pull their home addresses and personal emails, analyze their public social media, map their travel patterns, and generate customized phishing messages, all in hours rather than weeks.
And then there is the deep fake problem. Voice cloning technology can now replicate someone you love from as few as nineteen words of audio. That audio is already out there: in the birthday video your aunt posted, in the thirty-second clip your parent recorded at a family dinner. Chris told me that incidents involving AI-generated voice impersonation have exploded in just the past six months. It is not coming. It is here. And the family code word, something only the people in your household would know, has gone from a clever idea to a genuine necessity.
What This Means for Families Like Yours
The families I work with have spent decades building something meaningful. Financial security, business success, a legacy they hope to pass on. And one of the things I find myself returning to after this conversation is how invisible this threat tends to be until it isn’t. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t look dangerous. It looks like an email from Amazon. It sounds like your bank calling. It feels like your child’s friend asking a perfectly reasonable question online.
Cybersecurity is no longer just an IT problem. It is a family problem. And treating it with the same seriousness you bring to estate planning, investment strategy, and risk management is not paranoia. It is simply prudent. The same intentionality that built your wealth deserves to be applied to protecting it, and the people who matter most to you along with it.
You can listen to my full conversation with Dr. Chris Pierson on the Wealth and Purpose Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on our YouTube channel. Additional resources from his firm are available at www.blackcloak.io.
