Preventing Unplanned Takeovers for Private Equity Firms and their Portfolio Companies

For private equity (PE) firms and their portfolio companies, cyber risk is often a secondary concern, looked at more as an IT problem to solve than as a business risk that needs to be managed. Unfortunately, PE firms and their portfolio companies are finding themselves and their assets in the crosshairs of motivated and well-equipped cybercriminals with increasing frequency.

Many portfolio companies don’t have enough in-house resources to stay ahead of the threat curve and reduce their cyber risk effectively. As a result, threat actors are drawn by the potential of a huge payday and seek to execute sophisticated Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams and double-extortion ransomware attacks that target private equity firms and their portfolio companies.

New research from eSentire’s Threat Response Unit (TRU) – based on cyberattacks against PE companies across our global customer base – demonstrates that social engineering tactics present the greatest cyber risk to investment companies. These cyberattacks:

• Take advantage human fallibility to bypass perimeter defenses and deliver malware or ransomware using compromised websites (e.g., SolarMarker, SocGholish) or through carefully disguised emails scams (e.g., Emotet, Qakbot); and
• Leverage default operating system behaviors to execute malicious actions.

Download this report to learn more about the most concerning cyber threats impacting PE firms and recommendations from TRU on how your firm can strengthen your cyber defenses to increase cyber resilience and prevent business disruption.