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JPMorgan Chase is suffering a wave of cyber attacks as fraudsters get “smarter, savvier, quicker, more devious, more mischievous”, the bank’s head of asset and wealth management has said.
Speaking at Davos on Wednesday, Mary Erdoes said the bank spent $15bn on technology every year and employed 62,000 technologists, with many focused solely on combating the rise in cyber crime.
“We have more engineers than Google or Amazon. Why? Because we have to. The fraudsters get smarter, savvier, quicker, more devious, more mischievous,” Erdoes said. “It’s so hard and it’s going to become increasingly harder.”
Erdoes also said the bank suffered 45bn hacking attempts every day. However this figure was later corrected by JPMorgan, which said: “Ms Erdoes was referring to observed activity collected from our technology assets, malicious or not. This activity is then processed by our monitoring infrastructure.”
“Examples of activity can include user log ins like employee virtual desktops, and scanning activity, which are often highly automated and not targeted,” it added.
Western lenders have suffered a surge in cyber attacks in the past two years, which has been partly blamed on Russian hackers acting in response to sanctions placed on the country and its banks following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
But the use of artificial intelligence by cyber criminals has also increased the number of incidents and level of sophistication of attacks.
Last year, the number of ransomware attacks in the finance industry surged by 64 per cent, and was nearly double the 2021 level, according to Sophos, a cyber security company.
JPMorgan was the victim of one of the biggest cyber attacks on a bank a decade ago when the data on 83mn accounts — including 76mn households and 7mn business — were compromised.
Speaking at the same Davos event, Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the IMF, said the use of AI by cyber criminals was raising concerns for policymakers.
“Given the tremendous uncertainty about the scale of the impact of this technology and the way it is evolving, policy could be playing catch-up,” she said. “We could risk having a big event before we actually work out how to fix it.”
Gopinath said banks were among the biggest spenders on AI technology and that while there were many benefits for them in terms of improving productivity, there were also risks concerning data privacy and embedded bias in lending decisions.
She added that the IMF was also concerned about the long-term risk of AI affecting the behaviour of financial markets.
“If we enter a world where all major banks are using this technology, which is being produced by three or four big companies, are we going to see supercharged herding behaviour, where AI bots or models are sentiment-driven and feed off of each other?
“You then end up with much bigger amplitudes in the financial cycle — you get big credit booms and big credit busts. This is something we are looking into.”
This story has been revised in light of comments from JPMorgan that corrected Erdoes’ original statement regarding the number of cyber attacks on the bank
