JPMorgan Chase says hacking attempts are increasing
Banks across the US and Europe have reported a surge in cyber attacks over the past few years. Pictured is the JPMorgan Chase headquarters building in New York City.
New York (CNN) — JPMorgan Chase says it has seen a sizable increase in attempts by hackers each day to infiltrate its systems over the last year, highlighting the escalating cybersecurity challenges the bank and other Wall Street titans are facing.
JPMorgan Chase, the largest US bank by assets, now invests $15 billion a year and employs 62,000 technologists to, in part, help fortify its defense against cyber crimes, said Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of JPMorgan Chase’s asset and wealth management division, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday.
“We have more engineers than Google or Amazon. Why? Because we have to,” she said during a panel session. “The fraudsters get smarter, savvier, quicker, more devious and more mischievous.”
Banks across the United States and Europe have reported a surge in cyber attacks over the past few years. Some of that increase has been blamed on Russian actors in retaliation for sanctions put on the country after its invasion of Ukraine.
The rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence has also led to more complex attacks.
Speaking on the same panel, Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said that the use of AI by hackers is concerning to regulators.
“Given the tremendous uncertainty about the scale of the impact of this technology and the way it is evolving, policy could be playing catchup,” said Gopinath. There’s a risk that a “big event” occurs, she said “before we actually work out how to fix it.”
A recent Bank of England survey found that financial institutions think such attacks are the number one systematic risk to the sector. More than 70% of bank executives surveyed by KPMG last year said that cyber security was a major concern for their company.
“It’s so hard and it’s going to become increasingly harder. That’s why staying one step ahead of it is the job of each and every one of us,” said Erdoes on Wednesday.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story included comments by Erdoes on the number of hacking attempts made on JPMorgan systems last year. A spokesperson clarified after the panel session that Erdoes was referring to all observed activity collected from JPMorgan’s technology assets, malicious or not.
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