TOP RECOMMENDED DIGITAL ADVISERS

Dave King
digitalis

While some still talk of social media (and even the internet) as a new phenomenon, woe betide you if you don’t yet know the pitfalls.

‘There’s still a fair amount of naivety and misunderstanding,’ King previously told Spear’s when we asked if HNWs are becoming wiser on the web. ‘But what people in the public eye have woken up to is that we all come under scrutiny online and the internet is the starting point of cursory research or due diligence into you, your family, the office or your investments.’

Matters aren’t getting any easier when Google will notify journalists when it takes something down under the right to be forgotten, meaning a follow-up story is often written: ‘It can have a counterproductive effect.’

Such issues are why HNWs facing reputational hazards should call King. Digitalis often beats the search engines in identifying trends and can track online events before they become headlines.

King would like to see global regulations to protect reputation but admits this is likely a long way off. That’s a worry to the NSPCC patron: ‘We’ll see an increase in bespoke cyber-attacks — now 84 per cent of attacks start with social engineering.’

That means mining actual media to find out your travel or security arrangements, or even people in your organisation they can get to know with a view to perpetrating an attack: ‘Today that matters for reputation, tomorrow it will be more from a cyber-attack perspective.’