JPMorgan Chase Battles Rising Hacking Attempts

On a daily basis, JPMorgan Chase is combating a huge rise in hacking attempts, which shines a light on the increasing issues linked to cybersecurity that all the leading banks on Wall Street are experiencing.

On Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of JPMorgan Chase’s asset and wealth management division, said JPMorgan Chase, which is the largest U.S. bank in terms of assets, now invests $15 billion per year and employs 62,000 technologists across all of Global Technology, with part of this force going toward strengthening its power to beat cybercrimes.

During a panel session, Erdoes said, “We have more engineers than Google or Amazon. Why? Because we have to. The fraudsters get smarter, savvier, quicker, more devious and more mischievous.”

Over the past few years, banks across the U.S. and Europe have reported a rapid rise in cyberattacks, which has partially been directed at Russian actors in reaction to sanctions that were placed on the country after they initiated the war with Ukraine. Another reason for the steep increase is the expedited rise of artificial intelligence, which in turn has led to more sophisticated attacks.

Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund who spoke on the same panel as Erdoes, said that the use of AI by cyber criminals is making regulators concerned. She said, “Given the tremendous uncertainty about the scale of the impact of this technology and the way it is evolving, policy could be playing catchup.” She emphasized that there’s a high chance that a “big event” will take place “before we actually work out how to fix it.”

A recent systematic risk survey conducted by the Bank of England brought to light that financial institutions think these kinds of attacks are the No. 1 systematic risk to the industry. Over 70% of bank executives, who were surveyed last year by KPMG, one of the big four accounting firms, said that cybersecurity was a huge concern for their firms.

On Wednesday, Erdoes highlighted that the issue will become increasingly harder to deal with, and that’s why it’s their job as well as others to get ahead of it.