Take Charge of Your Cybersecurity
Built by practitioners. Designed for the small firm.
H2Cyber exists because the financial advisors running America's small firms deserve the same cyber expertise the big firms take for granted.
Why we built this
Paul Horn spent years inside a large independent broker-dealer and RIA, working alongside hundreds of financial advisors who were running small, one-to-ten-person shops. These were serious professionals managing real people's money. But when it came to cybersecurity, they had nobody in their corner. The firms big enough to afford a security team had one. Everyone else was on their own.
Paul had decades of real-world cyber experience. He decided to do something about the gap.
H2Cyber exists to put what's in a practitioner's head into the hands of the small firm owner who needs it, but at a basics level. Think of it as the cyber equivalent of washing your hands: something everyone should do, that doesn't take years to learn, and that makes a real difference when you actually do it.
The mission
There is no practical industry standard for small business cybersecurity today.
NIST published a small business guide (IR 7621) that has not been updated to reflect how small firms actually operate. It's a free PDF that can tell you what good looks like in general. It cannot tell you where your firm stands right now.
That's what we built H2Cyber to do.
Our goal is to make the H2Cyber cyber risk assessment the practical standard for small business, starting with the financial-advisor firms that need it most, and extending to any small business that holds something worth protecting.
You work hard for your clients. You should be able to prove you're protecting them.
Designed by practitioners
The H2Cyber assessment is not a checklist someone assembled from a template. It came from Paul's daily work in the field: the risks he sees, the controls that actually matter for a small firm, and the plain-English way of explaining them that a non-technical business owner can act on.
56 controls. Grouped into owner-friendly categories. Output is a letter grade (A to F) and, when your score reaches a threshold, a plain Level seal you can show a regulator, an insurer, or a client.
The basics of cybersecurity are not complicated. They're the arithmetic, not the calculus. You should not need a six-figure security budget to cover them.
Paul Horn, Founder and CEO
Paul Horn
Founder and CEO, H2Cyber
C|CISO, CISSP, CISM, CRISC, GCIH
Founded H2Cyber in 2019. Based in Prosper, TX.
Paul started H2Cyber after years inside the financial-services industry watching small firms get left behind. He designed the assessment from his field experience and leads H2Cyber's practitioner review work. Self-service assessments remain customer-completed. When you need a real person, you're reaching him or someone he's trained.
H2Cyber seal:
A plain seal records the Level earned by a self-assessment without the Validated band. A Validated seal additionally records H2Cyber review and explicit approval for that report. H2Cyber designs the seal to travel with you, whether you're showing it to a client, an insurer, or an examiner.
Why cyber is a specialty, not just another IT service
Paul uses this analogy a lot, because it's the right one.
In medicine, your family practitioner handles the everyday stuff. When you need a neurosurgeon, your doctor refers you out. They don't try to do the surgery themselves.
The IT world generally doesn't work that way. IT providers often keep cybersecurity in-house even when they don't have the specific training for it. That's not a criticism. It's how the market developed. But cyber is a specialty, the way cardiology is a specialty. The skills are different, the certifications are different, and the mistakes are different when you get it wrong.
H2Cyber is the cyber specialist. We're not here to replace your IT provider. We're here to cover the ground they may not be trained to cover.
If your IT team does have the right cyber depth in-house, that's great. Ask them. But know what you're asking.
You are not in this alone
A lot of small business owners know they should deal with cybersecurity and aren't sure where to start. Some are a little reluctant to admit out loud that they don't have much in place yet. That's exactly why we built the self-service option: you can go through the whole assessment privately, at your own pace, with no judgment and no sales call.
And when you want a real person to walk you through it, we answer the phone. Not a robot, not an offshore queue, not fifteen prompts to get to the right department. A person, in plain English, on your side.
Or call: 469-715-5255