By Vladimir Rabotka (pictured), Castle Hall Alternatives – Cybersecurity has rapidly become one of the most discussed issues in the alternative asset management industry. Regulators have provided multiple warnings around the need for investment managers to protect their businesses from cybersecurity risks. In response, both industry groups and tech consultants have published advice to help asset managers implement cybersecurity protections. On the other side of the industry, asset owners are now acutely aware of their governance, risk and compliance obligations to evaluate the cybersecurity preparedness of external asset managers within their operational due diligence programmes. However, investors must bridge the

Companies across all sectors are increasingly dealing with ransomware attacks as cyber criminals attempt to extort money by encrypting files and effectively holding data hostage. There are endless versions of ransomware but some of the more well known include: CryptoLocker; CryptoWall; TeslaCrypt, and CTB-Locker.  To underscore the scale of the problem, the FBI reported that in the first quarter of 2016, ransomware costs in the US totalled USD209 million. For the whole of 2015, the figure was USD24 million.*   The McAfee Labs Threats Report 2015 found that between Q4 2014 and Q1 2015, the number of ransomware attacks increased

Emerging technology has a tendency to go through a ‘hype cycle' when investor optimism leads to runaway valuations. The classic reference point is the dot.com bubble at the turn of the century, when tech stocks saw their price to earnings ratios spike above 60 times earnings.  With respect to cybersecurity, although the P/E ratio of stocks at the start of the year was 53 times earnings, it has since come down to 42 times earnings. That is still relatively high, from a valuation perspective, but the signs are that cybersecurity, as a sub-sector, should no longer be viewed as an

The impending introduction of General Data Protection Regulation ('GDPR') in 2018 is going to affect all organisations in terms of how they protect data. Marcus Lewis (pictured), Director, Technical Sales at Capital Support, a leading managed IT services provider, believes that within the funds industry, irrespective of whether it is UK law, EU Law or US law, "managers will comply, but of more concern to them is how they can demonstrate to their investors that their data is secure. "Our view is that the UK will have to subscribe to EU guidelines, because when organisations are doing business inside and

Mitigating insider risk is one of the biggest challenges that organisations face when it comes to remaining cyber secure. "One thing we've seen a lot of with clients is their need for consulting support," says Mark Coriaty (pictured), Senior Vice President Strategy & Partnerships, Eze Castle Integration. "They don't necessarily have the biggest IT teams and/or might have been more focused on the engineering side than the cyber side. Consequently, they are spending more time learning about the business, as opposed to just putting a solution in place.  "Cybersecurity comes down to operational and procedural policies as well as employee

RFA (Richard Fleischman & Associates) is a leading technology and financial private cloud provider for the asset management industry supporting more than 500 global private equity, hedge fund, fund-of-fund and investment management firms.  To help organisations remain cyber secure RFA is able to advise on documented policies and procedures, technology solutions, as well as provide threat management to mitigate cyber risks.  "We have a set of policies that we create for our clients at the onboarding stage. These cover things such as disaster recovery, the vendor management process (understanding the complete supply chain when using third party IT vendors/cloud providers),

Whilst the cybersecurity narrative typically tends to focus on how asset managers are putting steps in place to improve their cyber preparedness, of equal importance is how investors can assess managers objectively as part of their due diligence process.  Bringing that objectivity is sometimes overlooked. Investors might be interested to hear about how managers are tackling the problem, but they need a way to scorecard them. To help with this, Castle Hall Alternatives has launched Due Diligence University to support asset owners as they conduct due diligence on third party asset managers.  The first white paper, in what will become a