Cybersecurity Planning for HNW Families and Executives

Thank you both for joining me today to cover what I think is probably the number one threat to people's finances out there. Today it's been the second day of a really tough market with this tariff situation and I know that's on top of everybody's minds but I think what we're going to cover which is really cybersecurity and breaches in cybersecurity really poses a larger threat as a whole when people start thinking about their money then these temporary dips in the market. And you know, this part of our podcast, we call our tech talk series, and we're always looking for new solutions for clients to where they can utilize tech to better inform their financial decision-making.

And cybersecurity is one I think that no financial advisors, even us included, were really covering 10 years ago, but it's become so prevalent that I think we'd be remiss if we weren't covering it with clients nowadays. And so, for those at home, Sarah Rosen and Brooke Beckadam, am I pronouncing that correct? Brooke. Represent a company called BlackCloak. They're a fantastic solution we've been looking at for our high netw worth individuals, families, and corporate executives where they really provide, I think, a white glove service when it comes to cybersecurity.

But I thought before we even got to more of a background on what BlackCloak does and who you are, I thought it might be helpful just to talk to the size of this issue that we're dealing with. And I think the main thing I've noticed and I've gotten a number of calls from clients this year that are dealing with breaches and cybersecurity is that it's still more reactive than proactive. Number one. And the second thing is that it's become so prevalent that it's almost been normalized that it's something that people just it pops up and they deal with it and thankfully most of the time the damage isn't too bad.

But I'm sure doing what you do for a living you've seen scenarios where there are cases where people have these breaches in cyber securities and it is a huge issue for the family whether it's financially or you know reputationally. So, I don't know if you can speak to how big of an issue this is so people get a good idea of the scope of what we're dealing with here. Yeah, I'm happy to. And we're fielding these questions from individuals daily. So, we have a pretty good pulse on how people are feeling about cybersecurity in general.

Cyber security is a concept created sort of in the military and in business, right? There's plenty of cybersecurity thought process, development, evolution. Happening in the military and then again every corporation in America has some sort of information security team who is defending against protecting their information and defending it against people who want to steal it, right? And so as you think about that landscape, there's also a lot of families who have the same if not more assets than businesses. And as a hacker, you want the path of least resistance, right?

Is it hard to break into Home Depot and steal their data? Yeah, because they have 10,000 people thinking about nothing but cybersecurity. Would it be easier to break into Jim Bob's Wi-Fi who you know has access to assets and from there sort of figure out how to pull off a heist? We'll call it a heist. And so the problem is very pervasive and we can't see it. So the news for example, it focuses on scams that affect all of us. So recently e I got a it was a scam.

It was E4 E470 which is the beltway here in Colorado and it was telling me I owed $400 and they were going to turn off my access if I didn't respond to it. Right? That is something that a lot of people in the US got. That is a wide net that that hacker was casting and maybe 200 people fall for it and send $400. Right? What we're talking about with this target, this group of individuals, these high-net-worth, high-profile individuals, which is where BlackCloak focuses exclusively, they're a different tier of hacker here.

I call them the Oceans 11 hacker because it if you've seen the movie, it gives a really good idea of the amount of preparation, resources, and strategy that these guys are willing to put in, guys and girls that are willing to put in order to get to Jim Bob through his Wi-Fi. So, in terms of horror stories, and there's plenty, right? There's everybody has had a little situation, you know, where something went ary, and we like those. It inspires people to understand this is real. There was a situation, this must have been a year and a half ago, maybe a year ago at this point.

They weren't a client. It was a husband and wife. They were doing a dual vacation and work situation. They flew to Dubai. They stayed in a very nice hotel. They were in Dubai for two weeks, I believe. They got back on the plane 17 hours back to LAX. When they landed at LAX, every single one of their digital passwords had been changed. Everyone if you think about like your Excel that your energy right login every single one had been changed so that's a situation where it's pretty clear somebody had been sitting in their email or on their device for a very long time not unusual for them to sit and watch for a year collecting information collecting the details in their case maybe collecting passwords and pulling it all together in a heistlike faction both of them are about to be on a plane for 17 hours and chances that they have Wi-Fi are slim And so this is our 17 hours to sort of execute the heist.

And that's why I call them heists because they really are very well orchestrated and quite targeted. Yeah, I think that's very interesting context and it kind of leads me to, you know, BlackCloak itself and you mentioned, hey, there's a very specific group that we work with and you know, not everything is everything to all people. But I know there's, you know, different measures. You know, people even when they're starting out, a lot of people just have nothing in place and they say, "Where do I even start?

Do I need someone like BlackCloak?" and so we've had very preliminary conversations with clients about, well, there's some simple but effective measures that, you know, you can put in place just yourself. You know, one that's really common nowadays is this multifactor authentication, MFA, which basically means a lot of the times you're getting a text, you know, anytime you're trying to log in to view your bank statements or your financial accounts or even, you know, your Chipotle login, you can set up MFA nowadays. So that's a good starting place.

I know other people have used things like LifeLock or Privacy Guard when it comes to identity theft, which I know is a whole separate issue about people getting a hold of your information and then pretending to be you setting up new accounts elsewhere. But I think BlackCloak seems to be that third layer that's really important for a subset of individuals. And so maybe could you speak exactly to how BlackCloak goes about this? You know, where maybe the cut off is for someone who you think needs BlackCloak and maybe those that that don't and kind of the services, you know, that you use to help effectively combat, you know, some of the threats that are out there.

Yeah, sure. I think it's important first to define cyber crime, cyber we say cybersecurity, which is a defensive posture, right? What are we defending against? And it isn't clear, right? It's this enormous umbrella. They're trying to steal money and they usually do it with data and we know it's digital. That's kind of the extent of folks understanding cyber crime. So before we go into the solution, let me define for you what cyber crime actually is. So here is what is happening in almost every instance. There is a bunch of seemingly innocuous information about all of us digitally.

It is on data broker sites. It is on social media. It is on the dark web. And in isolation, it might not seem like it's going to be harmful, right? The floor plan layout to your house that's still in the real estate site. Your car 12 years ago, right? In isolation, these things might have minimal damage. But what the job of the hacker is is to take that seemingly innocuous information and use it in super creative ways to do one of three things. One, they want to trick you.

They want to have enough information that when they call and pretend to be Apple and try and trick you into downloading malware on your computer, they're successful because they have little pieces of information. I mean, these are essentially conmen that we're dealing with, right? They're building your confidence, right? Is this George McCabe? Is this your address? Is this the year you brought bought your computer, which they can find out if they're in their financial records, right? And now you're like, okay, I'm your guard goes down a little bit.

The second thing they're trying to do, they're trying to trick our devices, right? They want information that exists on our devices. I mentioned the example where they sit in the email. But think about breached passwords. If you're reusing a breach password, so password fuzzy bunny 1 2 3. If it has been breached, if it already exists on the dark web and you're using any form of it, fuzzy bunny 1 2 3 4 5 fuzzy bunny 235 exclamation point, they have tools that will very easily crack that code.

So the password you use for nike.com that may have gotten stolled in a breach and you're also using it for your Gmail, they are now really easily sitting inside your Gmail where they have access to information. And then finally they wanted to track our third parties which kind of brings us to MFA. So it is quite simple and not that expensive to go to a third party let's use AT&T as an example and convince them I am somebody I am not. So, if I have enough information to convince AT&T that I am Brooke, and think about what that might take, it's probably not that challenging.

They will switch her eim to my device. So, if you're using your phone for text codes for MFA, they will switch Brooks inbound for MFA onto my phone. Right? Like, now that's an interesting situation. And the reason that they're doing this, the reason they're trying to trick people, trying to trick devices, they're trying to trick third parties is ultimately they want to get at the good information that they can pull off the heist, right? But there's information on both sides of that, right? So when we think about mitigating risk overall, right, being less of a target, there's sort of four basic components.

One, let's get rid of as much data as possible about you on the internet. And we can do this even in instances when people are very high profile, right? It's a very specific type of information that we're looking for and we know where the hackers are looking to buy it. Number two, lock down your devices. So, we use industrialgrade malware essentially. We can get into the details about it, but consumer grade malware, it's not good enough, right? You need to up the coverage on your devices, the protection on your devices, your home.

So, your Wi-Fi, public Wi-Fi, is a huge access point to anything in your home that's connected to that Wi-Fi. So, if your Wi-Fi is insecure and the device settings, so let's call it a Ring doorbell or a Roomba or, you know, a smart TV, whatever it is, if the settings on that device aren't set up in a way, then whoever can access your Wi-Fi can then access your devices and therefore the information that is happening within your home. So, that's sort of the components of it.

When we want people to think through cybersecurity, it's a very hard thing to do if you can't frame the problem. But if you can think through less information on the internet devices, Wi-Fi, and then the third, that's interesting. Then the third will be there's a hearts sort of coming up from my the third would be educating ourselves. So having a Google news alert set up that just says scam or high netw worth individual scam, checking it every couple days. The articles are never long or complicated.

They're all pretty simple. And just staying ab breast on the new sort of what's new and innovative in the world of hackers. Yeah. And I'd like to dig in. So you mentioned all the different ways that these criminals are getting through and using people's information or finding people's information or getting through their devices. It's almost like I don't know what I don't know and this the purpose of this is not to scare the living daylights out of people but just to you know bring home the importance of this issue and the scope of this problem.

What are probably some of the different ways that these criminals are getting through to people's devices or even you know common misconceptions about well just because they got into my phone you know or even one of my kids' phones then I'm fine you know most the important information is on my device and so if they get through to one of my family members you know they can't get to me. Are there things like that that are out there that are just people don't understand well no that it is possible that they can find a way to you.

So, are there common things like that where these high net worth families think, well, you know, whoever the primary income driver is, well, as long as I'm protected, you know, on my main work computer, that's all that matters. Is there you know, an explanation of, you know, how many different ways are people getting through to these individuals? They're not going to try and break into your computer because they're absolutely right. That is well protected if you work for a corporation or really a business. They're going to target your personal comput devices.

And so when you think about your personal devices and don't just think can they break in and therefore steal elements of it. So let me give you an example of a recent sort of instance. So this is probably something most people can relate with. You are the husband of a husband wife pair. Your wife enjoys the first day of school. On the first day of school every day your wife takes a picture. It's really popular in social media to have a chalkboard that says something like the teacher's name and the grade and your kids's favorite snacks and what they're hoping to accomplish this year.

Seemingly innocuous. They post it because everybody's posting it because their children's going into the second grade. Fast forward three years. That information alone, the name of the teacher or even immediately, it doesn't even have to fast forward. The name of the teacher, what the kid likes, you know, think about that in a devious sense. How can you use that information in a devious sense? I could call the mom and tell her I needed X, Y, and Z because Mrs. Whoever the teacher is told me that Johnny and then you know even that basic example and so it's really how creative they can get in getting your devices.

The only way to increase or reduce the likelihood of them getting on your devices is to have stronger protection in place. Okay. And I know it's an ever evolving landscape where the tactics that criminals were using five years ago are vastly different than what they're using today. And I think an IT person or a company works with put it well when he said every time we build the walls higher the criminals build a taller ladder. And so you know one thing we want people to get out of this is some you know awareness of what's the most up-to-date type of scams that people are using and how can they protect against them.

So, can you speak to how that's evolved over the years and how it's improved? And again, just speak to the importance of addressing this because it's gotten so much more sophisticated. Yeah, I'll offer Oh, sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say, no, I was going to say I can talk to like at a high level some of the ways that, you know, people can understand that they're compromised just to understand those red flags. And then Sarah, if you wanted to get into like, you know, how those scams are being, you know, shown in everyday life, I think that would be a great way to kick off that question.

But first, I would say, you know, any sort of phone issue, like right now, we're seeing a lot of people their phones are acting up, it's slowing down, their batteries getting drained, or even just randomly restarting. And sometimes people just think that that's, you know, due to a new OS update or something like that. But these are all signs that something, you know, malicious could be happening on the devices. Another sign is any type of unusual email activity. So, if they're seeing unexpected login alerts or even emails being sent without them knowing, that's another big sign of an issue that we've been seeing lately.

Another one is just unfamiliar login on their devices. So, if they're getting notifications about login from, you know, Sarah lives in Boulder, right? But if, you know, they're not, you know, why is Sarah logging in from, you know, New York City? That that's unusual, right? That's not a characteristic that would normally come from Sarah. So those are definitely red flags that we're seeing. And then finally, you know, if you're just locked out of your account for any reason, that's definitely reason to you know, alert somebody or understand that your account is definitely compromised in some way.

And that these bad guys are using these tactics every single day with different types a multitude of types of scams. But it's just little seemingly harmless things. You know, oh, my phone restarted. That's weird, but I'll move on with my day. But it does it does help to pay attention to these little things. So yeah, and on that point, Brooke, I'm curious you know, in terms of when those red flags pop up, you know, what's the first thing people should be doing? I know even the best advice, it's so simplistic, but that we've gotten over the years is when you get these emails or texts where they're creating urgency.

Please click on this, you have this bill, it's overdue, do this, do that, was just take a deep breath, step away from your computer, your phone for like 10 minutes, think it over, talk to a third party about it. But when you're getting these alerts that maybe you're locked out of your account or you're logging into New York, what do you think is a good just first step for people to take? Because I think their first thought was just panic and they don't know what to do and they may even make the situation worse.

So, what would be your advice for the those people that run into that stuff? Of course. Yeah. And I think one of the things that Sarah and I say all the time is if you get an alert like that, like Sarah used the example of the toll road scams. And it just immediately makes your heart rate go up, it's definitely a sign. It's a it's a tactic that these people are using to get your attention because it's a way to make you stop what you're doing in your tracks and really just revert to, you know, the issue at hand.

How am I going to make this payment to, you know, stop them from finding me for overdue toll payments? Things like that. So I think there's a few different approaches that you could take. To start off, I would make sure that from a credit standpoint, you have all of your credit frozen through the three different bureaus. Making sure that you're just paying attention to your accounts. So that way if something, you know, of that matter pops up, you're already kind of ahead of the game just because you're understanding and you have your account your credit frozen.

I would say making sure that you're using a password manager. Not using that fuzzy buddy one two three password mult multiple times having you know a safe space for those passwords to be stored and giving these bad guys less information to be able to use against you and I guess I would say the final thing would be you know reach out to a service like black cloak right we have a concierge service that's 247 365 we're there for when you get that email right something seems a little bit fishy h it made me stop in my tracks.

Why don't I just send this to the team, have them do a onceover look, and just, you know, maybe there isn't something wrong, but you'd rather be safe than sorry in a case like this. Yeah. One thing you mentioned that it's a question I've gotten a number of times over the years where I've gotten conflicting opinions on how to deal with it. This idea of freezing your credit. And I've heard of people, you know, when the situation arises, they immediately do that, which is great. But what about proactively freezing your credit before it happens?

I've heard some people say, "Yeah, that's great because nobody can go out there and, you know, create new debt under your name." But I've also heard it could be maybe a hassle to be freezing and then if you know, are going to file for a mortgage to have to unfreeze and then explain it to the mortgage company, your lender. Do you have a position on that on whether people should be proactive in doing it, you know, just to have it there? Yeah, we have a strong one.

You're insane if you don't do it. So, but let's talk about the reputation that it has. First of all of our social security numbers are on the dark whip. There was a breach last fall. And based on the information we know about the breach, we can sort of deduce that every American social security number was sold in that breach. So you should just assume your social security number is on the dark web. And it is most useful when we think about credit and otherwise. And so to put a credit freeze in place, you have to go to three different websites and click a radio button that says freeze my credit.

I think you have to ask prove you're you. So there's probably a security question or not. Then this is just new credit, net new credit. So, if you were going to the Jaguar dealership and you decided without much forethought you wanted to purchase the Jaguar, you would then just click the radio button on those three websites and you can do it on your phone. BlackCloak does have an application that brings you directly to where those radio buttons are within those three sites. You still have to prove you're you but it simplifies the process and it's really there is no negative sort of impact on it besides a slight inconvenience at a time when you are requesting credit which usually is a planned event.

I would say you also when you unfreeze it you can unfreeze it for a defined amount of time. You can say unfreeze it for one day. Unfreeze it. I don't know if they have increments of time, but like you don't have to necessarily go back and refreeze it. Okay. And I'm sure your opinion is I feel like one thing that might come up because some people aren't applying for credit all that often is they put it on and they just forget and then they're at the dealership, they put it through and they're like, "Oh, now it's not going through." Maybe it dings their credit score.

But I feel like it's probably the pros outweigh the cons. That means you'll eventually be able to get that sorted out with the dealership. Correct. You know if something major event happens you know with your information that might be harder to reverse. So that makes complete sense to me and u thank you for clarifying that because like I said I've just heard different opinions on it over the years but that's pretty definitive. So thank you very much. Yeah we're looking we're thinking from a cybersecurity standpoint so know that.

Yeah true. I mean once that information goes falls out of the bottle right it's really hard to get it back in. So understood. Okay, great. And I think Sarah, you were going to speak to we were talking about, you know, the red flags, but then just recent scams and the improvement of these scams and where things stand as of today. So, what's the most common things that that you're seeing? And I guess what are the newest threats that are out there now that weren't out there even 5 years ago?

So, I think we think and we assume that when we think about how these scams are evolving, we think in like highly technical ways, right? Like if you think about a movie with a coder and they're in a dark room and there's a green screen, there's a bunch of code that us lay people don't understand. That's not necessarily the case. So, let me give you an example of an age-old scam that they dusted off last fall and it was very successful financially for them. I don't know who them is.

So we've all heard this. It's as old as time. You get an email says, "We've been looking through your camera. We're going to tell everybody what we saw unless you give us $2,000 in Bitcoin." Everyone's pretty aware that that's a scam at this point. This fall they did that. They added a picture of your home that they got from Google Maps and their ability to connect you to your address. Seemingly innocuous information, right? Connect to you to your address isn't that hard. And then Google Maps unless you've actively blurred it, which by the way, BlackCloak helps you actively blur it.

You know your house is available. It's just having that picture of the house and they added a sentence that says or we can talk about this in person. And people were so upset. That's such a simple innovation, right? Like that's almost nothing, but it completely revived the scam. I think other things to consider is new and in innovative ways we communicate. So the QR code QR code kind of existed for a while, but it really sort of hit its heyday during COVID, right? And it's still around.

It's on the side. It's how you pay a vendor for a hot dog, right? If you're at a food truck, you know, I mean, it's how you look at a menu. Well, that can be malware. So, if you open your phone and you do as you're supposed to with QR code, you sort of bring it into focus and then hit the button to go to the website, that could be malware. So, we have a QR code reader as part of our app and encourage people to use it.

Instead of using the phone, use the QR code reader. Exact same experience. Only with a QR code reader, it can tell you this isn't good, right? You're not supposed to go there. One scam that I'll mention that aligns to that that really scared the pants off of me because I would definitely fall for it even though I think about cybersecurity every day. It's called brushing. Not exactly sure where these names come from. And it was it became really popular in December around the holidays. And what happens is you will receive a box in the mail with some item in it.

Think of something like $25 of value, right? Like a Yeti mug, which we all probably have received in business situations. And inside there'll be a card and it says click here and it'll be a QR code to find out who sent this gift to you. I am 100% clicking on that QR code to find out who sent that gift to me. It's malware. The QR code is malware. So another aspect of Block is we're proilitizing new scams. Actually proitizing is not the right word because we're not we're educating our community about new scams when they come up.

Now, there's no way I would click on anything that has a QR code that comes to me directly. Right. And it's just that basic knowledge that that is a thing that is a scam that I think is really helpful. Yeah. And so, you mentioned education and I think it's good segue into, you know, given some of the families that might be listening to this say, "Hey, I fit the description of what you're talking about. You know, I realize the importance. You know, maybe I'm interested in working with BlackCloak.

You know, what does that what does that look like?" I know we even talked earlier this year. There was a case that potentially came up where there's number one people that are just being proactive and they're looking to get ahead of the issue. But I think you even said, "Hey, we have a specialized onboarding process for people that are going through a crisis." So, I think it sounded like getting set up is a good starting place and it reminded me of when we sit down with clients as a financial adviser and say, "Hey, we got to look at everything, not just your accounts with us.

You might have, you know, 401k, you might have you know, you got bank accounts, you've got different assets, maybe hard assets that we're not managing day in and day out, but it's important that we're aware of all of that." So I know you do a similar thing in terms of devices, number of homes people have, but then even the ongoing relationship and education. What does that all sort of look like at BlackCloak? So we are both preventative. We are ideally preventative. So it is common that we have react.

So somebody has an incident. Oh my goodness, what do I do? BlackCloak does do what's called incident response. We will help you clean up that sort of situation. We talk a lot about being proactive. You do not want to be in that situation. Even if we can help you clean it up, which we can, it is messy. It is expensive. It is heart-wrenchingly upsetting for that to happen to you and for any sort of major finances or reputational issues to come to be. And so, how do we establish that proactivity?

We are preventative in the areas that we mentioned earlier. So with innocuous seemingly innocuous information we are trying to remove that and it happens in different ways. I mentioned home blurring as an example. The big bucket that we're doing is around data brokers. This is marketing. If you Google somebody's address and you've probably seen a data broker, they want 99 cents and you can have their address. That's a data broker. There's about 600 of these guys we think that exist in the world and they're unregulated.

So they can use your data. They can make up the rules on how they use your data and how you when you request they not use your data. They can make up the rules. So that is to say you could ask them on a they could require you to ask them on the first of the month and they'll take it down for three weeks or they could require you to ask them in August and they'll take it down for four months. And so this becomes a huge whack-a-ole situation if an individual is trying to get their information off data brokers single-handedly.

Is it possible? Yeah, I think it's possible. It is more than a full-time job and it's the beginning of the tools of the trade for the hacker, right? No seemingly innocuous information. They're not going to target you because you're a harder target, right? They're bobbing for apples right now. They have lots of lowhanging fruit of people with lots of data out there. So, that's a big step. Black Local will help you with that. Will also educate you what exists on the dark web. We'll also hold your hand through any preventative measures that we recommend as a result of what is on the dark web.

You cannot remove date information from the dark web. So, social security number, we're going to help you put a credit freeze in place. The next thing that we're doing is devices. So, I mentioned we have enterprisegrade malware. It's a system called an EDR. It's an endpoint detection and response. It this is what every corporation is using in America. Some form of an EDR to protect what they call their endpoints, which is their laptops, right? Which is we're protecting people. They're protecting their laptops. Same concept. We don't want anybody to get the data that exists on the laptop.

And so it is AI based. It is extremely sophisticated tool. We have a security operation center that of 10 individuals who are manning it 24 hours a day. But what it allows us to do is block anything bad that's trying to get onto your computer in a digital sense. Wi-Fi. So Wi-Fi is really interesting in terms of like what access it can ultimately lead to. And a Wi-Fi router, which is really what needs to be secure, the router itself. You can envision it like a home, right?

And it has doors and it has windows. They're called ports. And there's very logical reasons you might have your window open. It's August and it's a lovely day outside. And then there's really obvious times you would never have your window open. It's December in Colorado. Like that's weird. Like we should investigate this. So, BlackCloak is doing weekly vulnerability scans through the public IP address on the routers of all of our clients and we're basically detecting is their window open and it's December, right? We're finding oddities in it.

And then we will do a full penetration test to see if we're able to access anything through the Wi-Fi. We'll let our customers know, but we're doing it on a weekly basis because in a given year, 40% of our clients Wi-Fi turned from secure to insecure. And most of that is inadvertent. There are inadvertent ways that you can change that router setting without ever knowing it. Sometimes it's an IoT device. You plug in an IoT device and it's a smart fridge. Hooray. You know, you can chill different levels at different amounts.

That may have inadvertently changed your router setting in the setup and you'd have no idea. So, that is why we're doing it on such a recurring frequency. We could because it's really important. It happens a lot. And imagine if somebody got into your Wi-Fi, right? Imagine if they had access to every device in your home. Like the amount of information they could get about you and your family is alarming. Finally, Brooke mentioned this before. We have a concierge team. Our concierge team consists of 35 plus individuals.

They are all have background in cybersecurity, fraud or privacy. We are not aligned with specific clients. As a client has an issue, we will pair them up with the individual on our cybersecurity team who has the most knowledge in that area. So for instance, we have a gal who is focused on understanding scams as it relates to social media. So as she stays a breast of what's happening in that narrow field, we can collectively share that with BlackCloak and that's where we really become bespoke, right?

The removing to data from the internet, the devices, the Wi-Fi, that's just a preventative layer, a black cloak if you will, that we're putting in place. When we think about the concierge team, we can get really bespoke to a family's needs. So imagine you have a twin do, two twin daughters, we're turning 14 this year, they get their first cell phones and therefore social media. We're going to recommend a halfhour long age appropriate conversation with the gal I just mentioned, our social media gal, so they understand how people use social media information nefariously, so they're just smarter in how they post.

I think that's all great both that you have the initial setup and then the ongoing education. You know, one thing that brings me to is let's talk about costs. The idea of, you know, a service like this, particularly when you're in the high net worth, ultra high net worth space, that's your base. We always think, you know, valuable service for a fair price is a smart thing to take advantage of. And something like this cost, but and you may have a better metaphor. To me, it's almost like you get homeowners insurance, like you pay it every year and hopefully your house never burns down.

And I've had you have some people at the end of 40 years of owning a home, they're like, "It never burned down. That was such a waste of money." In my mind, no, it's great that your house didn't burn down, number one. But two, you would have been protected had you didn't. So, I think for these types of families, you know, it's probably a drop in the bucket of their overall net worth. And when you weigh that versus the, you know, overall cost of a, you know, breach event, it's well, it's well worth it.

So I don't know if you have any comments on how your firm looks at cost and you know how you've talked about it with you know families because I think that is one of the big hesitations because it's such a complex topic. People feel like they don't fully understand it and people don't like paying for something that they don't fully understand. Sounds like a firm does a good job of breaking it down in simple language so they can understand as they work with you. But that initial step of saying I need to do this I think is I just see that a lot.

So I don't know if you either of you have any comments on the cost of something like this. Yeah. And I think we can share the our cost broadly. So we are based on an annual renewal cycle. So you join BlackCloak for a year and pretty much any household you can construct. It's going to be less than $10,000 a year. And really what makes the difference there is your total number of homes. We will cover all of your homes. That sort of shifts what the price might be.

And again, 10,000 is the most that any of our sort of supreme packages are going to cost. The other component is if you want to be able to interact with our security operations team on the weekend, we will always address urgent inbounds, right? If somebody sends an urgent inbound regardless if they have access technically to our security operations, we're going to respond to it. But if you want to talk to them about how to click in a link on a Saturday afternoon, sure we can we can make that we can establish that for you.

I think people can determine if we they can assess it is hard to assess if the pricing because we don't have any equal competitors in the market. So if you're looking at lifelock, which is identity verification, which is really just looking at sort of the credit and the fraud, that's what $70 a year, I'm not even sure, right? We seem considerably more expensive, but understanding the comprehensive nature of what BlackCloak is doing on behalf of your family to be protective, then all of a sudden once people understand it, we tend to get the feedback that like, oh well, absolutely I'll do this.

This makes all the sense in the world. Yeah. And that's really, you know, what brought me to reach out to your firm in the first place. And there's no for any of our clients that was saying, there's no business relationship between us and BlackCloak. I just had read about this through an advisor article a number of years ago and it just spoke to what clients in that wealth space typically need which is they need something that's more comprehensive than the typical individual and they do like the ability to be able to talk to their quote unquote professional when they have time for it or when they need to or when there's an emergency and that I think is kind of unique to BlackCloak from some of these other services I've seen even a lot of the you identity theft protection entities that are out there.

They're just huge outfits. And so every time you're talking to a new individual, you've got call wait times. It can be frustrating. And frankly, people that, you know, are at that level of wealth, you know, typically have less of a tolerance for that or they just think that they can afford, you know, a better level of service. So, I think that BlackCloak is really hitting that well and fulfilling that need for them. But those were, you know, a lot of the top items I had and I think you both answered all my questions very well.

But any other items I didn't mention that you think are critical to cover for clients of ours that should be thinking about this type of service or just anything about BlackCloak that I missed. You had mentioned how people can review themselves and the way I interpret that is almost like deduce how big a risk they're in right how much of a risk that exists so black does do risk assessments and we have a couple different brands and varieties but we can help illuminate a little bit more specifically exactly how much risk you as an individual are have as a result of cyber and digital and privacy.

So that that's one aspect. I believe we're the only ones doing that in that space right now. But if you go back to that privacy, so there are a lot of firms that are removing your information from the internet if that's all you want, which is super important. It's a great step if that's all you want. There are tons of firms that are doing that. What they're not doing that black cloak is unique in is also tackling the devices, the Wi-Fi, and then to your point, having a concierge level of service.

Our onboarding is 15 minutes. That is all we require to put 75% of what I talked about in place. Right? In that 15 minutes, we will start monitoring your Wi-Fi. We will put the app on all your mobile devices. We will educate you on what exists on the dark web. We will have already started clearing off your name from data broker sites. A little extra time, 15, 20 minutes to add a computer, which we highly recommend. That's the devices. Finishing that devices component. So I think people have an expectation that there's people who show up to your house and this is a big implementation.

All we need is 15 minutes. We are working quite deliberately off of OSENT information which is open source intelligence. We are finding stuff about our clients that hackers can find and we're trying to put ourselves in those positions. Okay. Well, I appreciate that context and yeah, I think we'd be good to wrap on that. And I would just, you know, finish by saying, you know, this type of podcast, I continue to believe that the advisor's role in this whole situation is just to be aware that, you know, we know we can't do everything for our clients and this type of service is just a whole another layer of expertise that we think it's really important that people outsource, but we still want to be a part of that conversation.

I think there's always things that we can learn and you know part of their cybersecurity picture is you know we're affected by what they're doing. You know they have accounts with these custodians that that we work with. They have passwords you know with those custodians and there's a lot of sensitive information within those custodians and so we want to be a partner in the conversation with our clients. It's beyond an introduction to a company like BlackCloak. But it's really to put it in their hands and say, "Hey, you're really going to do, you know, get under the hood and do all the nitty-gritty, but you know, we'll be here to learn what we can and help where we can to tighten up the screws on anything that's loose from a cybersecurity standpoint." So, Brooke and Sarah, I really appreciate you both being here today and thanks for sharing your expertise with our client base. Our pleasure. Thank you.

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