The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) just gave the world a $21 billion wake-up call. According to its 2025 report, cybercrime costs reached a record $20.8 billion in losses last year, sounding the alarm bells on the critical need for personal cyber insurance policies that offer proactive risk management.
The FBI IC3’s annual report states that business email compromise (BEC) and financial fraud are the two leading methods of cybercrime. Long considered a corporate network issue, BEC is now the primary way cybercriminals infiltrate enterprises by targeting the personal vulnerabilities of key leaders. At the same time, high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) are increasingly victims of cyber-enabled fraud, with AI playing a central role in enabling cybercriminals to create deepfake impersonations and realistic phishing emails and texts, thereby lowering the barrier to entry for malicious hackers.
As the adage goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” For cyber insurance underwriters and brokers, offering a policy that only covers remuneration for damages after an event is no longer enough. To manage risk effectively for HNWIs and business leaders, insurance must pivot toward a preventive cybersecurity model that stops incidents – and the long-lasting financial and reputational consequences that follow – before they can happen.
Modern Executives and the Expanding Attack Surface
The FBI IC3’s 2025 report findings highlight growing dangers and underscore the rapid expansion of the personal attack surface, fueled in large part by the rise of AI:
- Business email compromise: Scams that compromise business and individual email accounts to conduct unauthorized transfer of funds accounted for 15% of all 2025 losses, totaling slightly more than $3 billion.
- Cyber-enabled fraud: 85% of all losses reported in 2025 were due to cyber-enabled fraudulent activities, including theft of money, data, or identity, or the creation of counterfeit goods or services, totaling $17.7 billion in losses.
- Tech/customer support fraud: In 2025, nearly 48,000 complaints were filed by individuals about cybercriminals posing as technical or customer support/service representatives, resulting in losses totaling $2.1 billion.
- AI-fueled threats: For the first time, the report includes a section on AI-enabled cybercrime and scams, reporting that IC3 received 22,364 complaints in this category, which accounted for over $893 million in losses.
High-profile enterprise executives and high-net-worth individuals are caught in the crosshairs of these attacks. Because they have broad digital footprints, typically own multiple homes with numerous smart devices, and maintain significant public profiles, they are now prime targets of cybercrime. Additionally, it’s a tremendous challenge to maintain privacy in the digital era, with social media and the instant, broad dissemination of information. Events we prefer to keep private can instantly become public knowledge, creating a risk profile that corporate cybersecurity policies typically fail to address.
Personal cyber insurance brokers are ideally suited to help their clients consider how a single personal indiscretion or data leak can have long-term career and reputational impacts. Beyond that, however, they have a professional and ethical responsibility to protect their clients – not just provide reactive cyber coverage.
Making the Case for a Digital Bodyguard
In the modern cyber landscape, fraught with potential exposures and points of vulnerability at every turn, highly vulnerable individuals can benefit from personal cybersecurity protection that fills the gaps left unaddressed by enterprise cybersecurity. By shifting from a reactive cyber policy to a proactive, preventive risk-management offering, insurance brokers and underwriters can provide clients with a “digital bodyguard” to protect them while safeguarding their bottom line. I’m not talking about security software; I’m talking about a preventive capability that protects people and stops incidents from ever causing harm.
The core elements of comprehensive, proactive protection include:
- Minimizing digital footprints: Actively reducing an individual’s "attackable" surface area by minimizing how much information they share online.
- Data broker removal: Scrubbing personal info from the sites that feed cybercriminals.
- Hardening accounts and devices: Moving beyond basic passwords to elite-level security to ensure personal accounts and devices are not vulnerable to malicious access.
- Home network scanning: Continuous monitoring of home networks – the "soft underbelly" of executive security – to detect suspicious activity before it causes harm.
- Training & hygiene: Empowering individuals and their families on appropriate online behaviors, how to spot scams and threats, and continuing ways to minimize their attack surface.
- Incident response: Around-the-clock expert support to respond rapidly when a significant threat is detected.
The reasons for offering this type of personal cybersecurity protection and risk mitigation to corporate and individual clients are a no-brainer: insurance brokers can foster greater trust, improve client retention, and safeguard their clients’ financial posture. Preventing a $1 million breach and the resulting reputational and financial repercussions is far more advantageous than paying out on a claim.
Demand for this type of specialized protection is rapidly growing, as organizations and individuals gain a better understanding of what’s at stake. Insurance underwriters and brokers have a window of opportunity to capitalize on this growth before other trusted advisors step in and bolster their own service offerings.
Don Poster, vice president and senior director - national family office leader of Aon Private Risk Management, states: "Our clients rely on us to preserve both their legacy and their lifestyle. In 2026, you simply cannot protect a client’s wealth, assets, family, and privacy without also protecting their digital identity. We view digital executive protection not as a tech add on, but as a fundamental component of holistic risk protection.”
Diane Delaney, executive director of the Private Risk Management Association (PRMA), agrees. “The PRMA recognizes that the most successful brokers are those who offer more than just an insurance policy safety net. By taking proactive risk management approaches such as integrating digital executive protection, brokers can provide a holistic layer of protection that helps mitigate the reputational and financial fallout that traditional cyber insurance policies are meant to cover,” she said.
Locking Down the Future
Traditional insurance reacts to and repairs damage – in simple terms, it’s like getting a broken arm treated at the hospital. Proactive personal protection prevents the break from happening in the first place. In the modern digital realm, AI-powered threats targeting high-profile, high-net-worth individuals are rampant, and the personal attack surface continues to expand. The unfortunate reality is that corporate defenses often fall short of protecting individuals.
The solution is a proactive "digital bodyguard" approach – the best and most sustainable way to manage and mitigate executive risk, and protect people and corporations from significant, costly attacks and breaches. It’s time for insurance brokers and underwriters to stop viewing personal cyber as a standalone policy and begin offering a comprehensive service to lock down an individual’s digital footprint and safeguard their future.
