JPMorgan Chase fights off 45 billion hacking attempts each day

JPMorgan Chase now fights off about 45 billion attempts a day by hackers to infiltrate its systems. That’s double what it was 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 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.

FILE - The seal of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission at SEC headquarters, June 19, 2015, in Washington. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday, Jan. 9, 2024, that a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, announcing that the securities regulator had approved the trading of exchange-traded funds holding bitcoin was fake, and that the agency's account had been "compromised." (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)

Related article FBI is investigating the SEC hack after its fake bitcoin post

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.