So, you’ve received a death threat at home. What’s next? Death threats come in many forms: tweets, texts, even dead animals delivered to your doorstep. At Insite, we’ve dealt with them all. The one thing these threats have in common is this: many people will make them, very few of them will actually act on them.
Insite’s President, Chris Falkenberg, spoke with Anders Melin and Hema Parmar of Bloomberg News about how hedge fund managers are increasingly the focus of death threats, which require proactive and reactive mitigation strategies. “The vitriol is more extreme, focusing not only on their stock positions but also their cultural positions,” Falkenberg said. “It becomes inherently more personal, and the trader becomes more of a personal enemy.”
“While spending on security is routine for hedge funds, much of their attention in the past had been focused on cybersecurity,” Falkenberg said. “But even before the events of the past month, clients had begun to bulk up their physical defenses at home, where they’ve been spending more time than ever because of the pandemic.”
Insite Analysts have been reviewing Protective Intelligence programs for many asset managers with an eye on effective analysis and escalation protocols for bona fide threats. Does the perpetrator have the intent and ability to engage in targeted violence? What are the procedures to investigate threats that have the potential to spill from online to the doorstep of the target? Are physical security measures upgraded at the homes of key executives? Insite issued a briefing on the fundamentals of threat analysis, which offered several illustrative cases with key takeaways.
Click here to request Insite’s Asset Manager Threat Briefing.