The family business insights series
Family business cybersecurity, 2026
This report offers a timely view into the evolving cybersecurity landscape for family businesses. With annual revenues reaching billions and family ownership at the core, these organizations face a complex web of cyberthreats that demand careful and strategic action.
This edition of the Family business insights series explores the real impact of cyberattacks on family businesses worldwide and highlights both the current strengths and critical gaps in their defenses. Whether you are building foundational safeguards or seeking to strengthen advanced cyber resilience, you will find invaluable perspectives and actionable insights that may help protect your business today and support lasting success in an increasingly digital world.
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of family businesses globally have faced at least one cyberattack in the past two years, while a third (33%) have experienced two or more attacks. And exposure is near universal. While Asia Pacific leads in attack frequency, with 90% having experienced at least one attack, a substantial majority in each region has also experienced at least one attack—ranging from 61% in South America to 77% in North America.
These attacks come in many forms, such as malware (experienced by 49% of respondents), phishing/business email compromise schemes (48%), social engineering (43%), third-party risk (40%), and insider threats (27%).
Despite the pervasiveness of these threats, merely 43% of family businesses globally report to have a “robust” cybersecurity strategy that has never failed them. A greater proportion (57%) has either a strategy with noticeable gaps (49%) or no strategy (8%). As a result, nearly half of family businesses (48%) feel only moderately prepared (39%) or not at all prepared (9%) should a cyberattack hit.
At present, most family businesses rely on basic first-line controls, such as software updates (59%), network security (57%), multi-factor authentication (MFA)/passwords (57%), and data backups (48%). However, reliance on advanced capabilities, such as incident response playbooks (40%), cyber maturity assessments (36%), vendor governance (32%), and identity management (31%), are less widespread. Reliance on basic cyber hygiene can help protect against opportunistic attacks, but more advanced measures are often better at protecting against sophisticated attacks.
As a result of many family businesses having limited cyber defenses, it has become commonplace for them to experience loss or damage from an attack. In fact, most of those targeted have experienced financial (54%), operational (51%), and/or reputational (51%) harm. Only 4% of respondents globally say they have experienced no loss or damage, which is powerful evidence to suggest that more needs to be done to enable cyber resilience.
