JPMorgan Chase reported that over the past 12 months, there has been a daily increase in the intensity of hacker activity aimed at attempting to infiltrate the systems of this financial institution.

Currently, the problems of ensuring the security of banks in cyberspace are growing. The corresponding risks and threats become more sensitive and significant aspects in the virtual environment of the functioning of financial institutions. JPMorgan Chase and other major Wall Street lenders can’t ignore the increased attempts by hackers to infiltrate bank systems. Against the backdrop of these realities, the issue of ensuring cybersecurity is becoming more urgent.

JPMorgan Chase is currently the largest organization in the US banking sector in terms of assets. The financial institution is investing $15 billion a year to strengthen its cybercrime defenses. The bank is also hiring 62,000 technologists as part of the corresponding efforts. Mary Callahan Erdoes, head of JPMorgan Chase’s asset and wealth management unit, made the relevant announcement this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. During a panel session, she said that the financial institution has more engineers than Google and Amazon, which is a necessity as fraudsters become more agile, smarter, more savvy, more harmful, and more resourceful.

Over the past few years, banks in Europe and the United States have seen a sharp increase in the number of cyber attacks. The development of artificial intelligence systems in terms of their capabilities creates new threats in the cybersecurity sphere. AI has made hacker attacks more difficult in terms of possibilities of the counterwork. Artificial intelligence makes deception more realistic, thereby reducing the chances of detecting it. Also, machine intelligence makes algorithms and mechanisms for implementing criminal attacks more complex.

Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said at the mentioned panel session that the use of artificial intelligence by hackers is a concern for regulators. According to her, policy can be proactive given the enormous uncertainty surrounding the scale of impact of next-generation technology and its development. In this context, she specifically noted that there was a risk that a major event would occur before a strategy to respond to this situation was developed.

Bank of England survey results show financial institutions identify cyber attacks as the top systematic risk for the banking sector.

More than 70% of bank executives surveyed by KPMG said cybersecurity is a major concern for their organizations.

Mary Callahan Erdoes says hacker attacks are becoming more sophisticated, noting that this trend will continue, which is why it is important to stay one step ahead.

Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, says that the bank’s technological assets collect the observed activity, after which the relevant data is processed by the monitoring infrastructure. He cited user log-ins in employee virtual desktops as examples of suspicious activity.

As we have reported earlier, JPMorgan Chase CEO Warns of Recession Risk.