Think You're Too Small for Security? Think Again.

Not every company needs a compliance certification. If you're a wealth management firm, a family office, a VC fund, a law firm, or a private medical practice, nobody is sending you a security questionnaire or asking for your SOC 2 report. There's no enterprise procurement process to pass. No auditor knocking on your door.

But you're sitting on some of the most sensitive information imaginable.

Client net worth. Investment positions. Tax returns. Estate plans. Wire transfer instructions. Fund performance data. LP personal information. Deal flow. Cap tables. Bank account details. Attorney-client privileged communications. Case files. Medical records. Patient diagnoses. Prescription histories. Billing information.

A breach at a family office doesn't make the news. It makes a phone call from a client whose entire financial life just got exposed. A breach at a law firm compromises privileged communications that can torpedo active litigation. A breach at a medical practice exposes patient health records with HIPAA notification requirements and potential federal penalties. These are different kinds of consequences than a SaaS company losing email addresses.

Most wealth management firms, family offices, VC funds, law firms, and medical practices operate with 5 to 30 people. Small team. Lean operations. No IT department. Maybe a managed service provider handling the basics.

Attackers know this. They also know that the data inside these firms is extraordinarily valuable. A compromised email account at a family office can lead to fraudulent wire transfers. A breached file share at a VC fund exposes LP data, deal terms, and portfolio company financials. A ransomware attack on a law firm locks up privileged case files with no backup to restore from. A phishing attack on a medical practice exposes thousands of patient records and triggers HIPAA breach notification requirements.

These firms don't get targeted because they're famous. They get targeted because they're valuable and often under-protected.

I hear it regularly. "We're only 8 people." "We don't have customer data like a SaaS company." "Nobody's going to hack a dermatology practice."

Every firm that's been breached thought the same thing. Size doesn't determine risk. The value of the data and the strength of the controls around it do.

A $2B family office with 6 employees and no MFA on their email is a higher-value, easier target than a 200-person SaaS company with SOC 2 and an MDM. A 4-attorney law firm handling M&A transactions has privileged deal documents worth millions sitting in an unencrypted email inbox. A medical practice with 3 providers and 2,000 patient records has a HIPAA obligation regardless of how small the office is. The SaaS company has controls. These firms often have a Gmail password from 2019.

You don't need SOC 2. You don't need ISO 27001. You don't need a GRC platform. You need the fundamentals done right. Here's what that looks like for a small firm handling sensitive information.

Wire fraud is the number one financial risk for wealth management firms and family offices. The attack pattern is simple and devastatingly effective:

An attacker compromises an email account (often through phishing). They monitor email traffic and learn the firm's communication patterns. They wait for a legitimate wire transfer conversation. They insert themselves into the thread with modified wire instructions, often from a lookalike email address. The firm sends the wire to the attacker's account. The money is gone.

I've seen this happen to firms managing hundreds of millions of dollars. The losses are immediate and usually unrecoverable.

The defense is simple: never execute a wire transfer based solely on email instructions. Always verify by phone using a number you already have on file, not a number from the email. Always. No exceptions. No matter how urgent it seems. Make this a firm-wide policy and enforce it.

If you handle sensitive financial data and you don't have cyber insurance, get it. Policies for small firms typically cost $2,000 to $5,000 per year and cover breach response, forensics, legal fees, client notification, and in some cases wire fraud losses.

Most cyber insurance applications will ask about your security controls: MFA, backups, endpoint protection, email security. Having these in place before you apply will get you better coverage at a lower premium. Not having them may get you denied.

Depending on your firm type, you may have regulatory obligations around cybersecurity that exist whether or not you pursue a certification:

Even if you're not directly regulated, your clients and patients increasingly have expectations about how you protect their information. High-net-worth individuals, institutional LPs, corporate clients, and patients are all more aware of data security than they were five years ago. Having clear answers builds confidence.

For a firm of 5 to 30 people, getting the fundamentals right costs less than most people think:

• Password manager: $5-10 per user per month.
• MDM: $5-15 per device per month.
• Email security (advanced threat protection): usually included in Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace business plans.
• Backup solution: $50-200 per month depending on data volume.
• Cyber insurance: $2,000-5,000 per year.
• Security advisor to set it all up and maintain it: $2,000-5,000 per month.

Total: roughly $3,000 to $8,000 per month for a firm managing tens of millions to billions in assets. That's a rounding error on the AUM. The cost of a single wire fraud incident or data breach is 10 to 100x that.

You don't need a certification. You don't need a compliance framework. You need someone to set up the basics, make sure they're working, and keep an eye on things so you can focus on managing money, practicing law, treating patients, or closing deals.

That's what we do for our wealth management, family office, VC, law firm, and medical practice clients. No frameworks. No audits. Just practical security that protects the firm and the people who trust you with their most sensitive information.