Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting high-net-worth individuals rather than corporate networks, according to insurance specialists, as personal digital defences continue to lag behind the value of the assets being protected.
Darren Walsgrove, personal lines director at Everywhen, said the risks extend beyond financial loss.
"For these individuals, it's not just their wealth on the line — it's their reputation and personal data. As a high-net-worth individual's influence and public exposure grows, they become more of a target," he said.
Cybercrime cost the UK economy £38.1 billion in 2024, with the figure projected to reach £44.6 billion in 2025 and potentially £71.9 billion by 2027, according to Statista data cited by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
Social media is a significant vulnerability. Wealthy individuals with multiple accounts, properties and business interests present numerous entry points for attackers, and information shared online by family members can compound the risk even where the individual exercises caution. In the first half of 2023, the UK lost £43.5 million to deepfake impersonation fraud, with AI-generated voice and video increasingly used to deceive victims.
Walsgrove said underwriters are already incorporating digital behaviour into their assessments.
"Private client executives will check whether photos of valuable items have been posted, holiday updates shared, or anything that reveals the home is empty. Being outspoken on social media may not induce a good rating factor and can attract the wrong kind of attention," he said.
He also noted that burglary claims continue to be driven by basic security failures rather than sophisticated attacks. "Many burglaries occur while clients are actually at home and no security has been set — whether that's when everyone is asleep, or when a young person is left home alone. Social media does not need to know your family's timetable."
Most standard home insurance policies either exclude cyber risks entirely or apply caps that fall well short of the exposures facing wealthy clients.
The mean cost of a cybercrime to UK businesses stood at £1,970 in the most recent government survey, though for larger organisations the average rises considerably, with UK businesses reporting an average cost of £10,830 per cyberattack in 2024.
For high-net-worth individuals, the potential losses from a targeted social engineering attack or deepfake-assisted fraud can run to multiples of those figures.
Some 62% of small UK businesses now carry cyber insurance, up from 49% in 2024, according to the government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey, but personal lines cyber cover for wealthy individuals remains a significantly less developed segment, with most standard household policies offering little or no meaningful protection.
UK cyber claims totalled £197 million in 2024, a 230% increase on the prior year, with ransomware and malware accounting for 51% of all payouts, according to the Association of British Insurers. UK premiums fell 11% across 2025, a level brokers have described as approaching the floor of sustainability.
Marks & Spencer suffered a ransomware attack over Easter 2025, with up to 10 million customer records compromised and an insurance claim reportedly approaching £300 million. A near-simultaneous attack on Co-op led the UK's Cyber Monitoring Centre — an independent non-profit body established by the insurance industry — to classify the two incidents as a single combined cyber event.
Co-op estimated it lost £206 million in sales from the incident, while Jaguar Land Rover separately reported a loss of £485 million following a cyberattack that halted production.
These events underscore the scale of financial exposure that major incidents can generate and the importance of insurance programmes being calibrated to realistic loss scenarios rather than outdated coverage assumptions.
