The Exposed Athlete: Why High-Net-Worth Visibility Creates High-Value Targets with BlackCloak

In a Beyond the Game session moderated by Worth Media's Dan Costa, BlackCloak's Sarah Rosen (Managing Director, Private Client Services) and Kayla Freitag (Account Executive, Athletics) made the case that professional athletes occupy a uniquely dangerous corner of the cybersecurity landscape. BlackCloak's origin story, Rosen explained, traces back to the early days of COVID, when threat actors realized corporate networks were hard to crack but executives' home Wi-Fi was not. Athletes, it turned out, were an even softer target. "They're so public, they have a big circle of trust, they're moving around physically often. They're the perfect target," Rosen said. Unlike executives, whose travel is largely private, an athlete's calendar is published online, their hotels are an open secret, and their compensation is reported in real time.

The panel made clear that the line between digital and physical risk has all but dissolved. Freitag pointed to the recent wave of home robberies targeting athletes whose schedules telegraph exactly when they're away. Rosen described a case in which a star NBA player challenged BlackCloak to find the new home address he had painstakingly hidden. They found it not through technical wizardry but through a Christmas card his wife had posted on social media, cross-referenced against real estate listings in the city. "Bad guys, like these threat actors, are looking for breadcrumbs," Rosen said. "They're using it to pull off a trick. That's their fodder." The exposure compounds quickly: a personal chef's TikTok, a tagged kitchen, an old Hotmail breach surfacing on the dark web – every fragment becomes useful intelligence.

A second risk factor, Freitag emphasized, is the makeshift support structure around most athletes. Where a corporate executive is backed by enterprise IT and a CISO, "an athlete comes in, they get drafted, they sign a multi-million-dollar deal, and then they're like, I have my aunt or uncle managing my assets, and I have my sports agent." That improvised inner circle of cousins, agents, accountants, and friends is itself a target, and breaching any one of them can be a back door to the principal. Rosen noted that younger athletes present a particular paradox: "Younger people are tech savvy, but they're the opposite of privacy savvy. They literally don't understand digital privacy." Much of BlackCloak's work, the panelists said, is awareness training, coaching clients (and sometimes quietly protecting them without their knowledge, at the request of team security) on the small behavioral changes that shrink a digital footprint.

The session closed with practical recommendations and a pair of cautionary tales. Freitag urged consistent VPN use on hotel and airport Wi-Fi: "Unsecure Wi-Fi is like a postcard. Anybody that sees that postcard can read what's on that postcard." She also recommended a password manager for the four account areas that matter most: social media, financial, email, and healthcare. Rosen warned that sophisticated attackers will sit inside a victim's email for a year, studying tone and phrasing until they can impersonate a wealth advisor perfectly. She also flagged a fast-spreading scam in which threat actors hijack Paperless Post or similar invitation accounts and send malware-laced invites to a target's poker group, leveraging real contacts, real history, and real trust. "I would definitely click on that link," Rosen admitted. "I'm definitely falling for that scam if I don't know about it." The takeaway for athletes, their teams, and their circles of trust was unambiguous: visibility is the threat surface, and assuming someone is always watching is no longer paranoia. It's the baseline.

Learn more about Beyond the Game Summit 2026.