Banks Firm Up Defenses as AI Drives 76% of Cyberattacks

Banks are reportedly increasing their efforts to defend themselves against cyberattacks amid new technological breakthroughs.

As the Financial Times (FT) reported Monday (April 20), banks including JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds and Santander are taking steps to protect their systems against these threats.

“More is changing now and faster than we have seen in a long time, the time to find and exploit vulnerabilities is drastically decreasing,” Patrick Opet, chief information security officer at JPMorgan, told the FT.

The report cites the IBM X-Force 2025 Threat Intelligence Index, which showed that the finance and insurance industries made up 27% of cyberattacks last year, the second largest share among all sectors.

As the FT notes, the role of financial institutions at the core of modern economies has made them an obvious target for cybercriminals who hope to take advantage of both their financial reserves and large stores of customer data.

“It is the ability to get paid in a ransomware scenario [which motivates hackers],” said Katherine Kearns, head of proactive cyber services at cyber security consultancy S-RM, adding that this has turned financial services firms into attractive targets.

It’s why banks are often early adopters of new cybersecurity technology such as multi-factor authentication and increased supply chain safeguards, the FT added.

Still, experts have begun to caution that rapid AI adoption has provided cybercriminals with new methods of attack. The FT cites research commissioned by financial and risk advisory company Kroll that show 76% of companies have experienced a security incident involving AI applications or models in the last two years.

And as covered here last week, the newest models from artificial intelligence giants like OpenAI and Anthropic could mark a critical inflection point in the cybersecurity space.

“AI is no longer just a tool in the hands of an attacker; it is beginning to replicate aspects of the attacker itself,” that report said.

For both finance chiefs and information security executives, the implication is increasingly stark, the report continued, with cyber risk shifting from a targeted phenomenon to something more akin to ambient exposure.

“Organizations are not just selected; they are continuously scanned, probed and tested by systems operating at scale,” PYMNTS added.

“The median enterprise, the one with uneven patching, over-permissioned accounts, and inconsistent configuration management, is now more accessible to multistep intrusion attempts that can be executed, or at least orchestrated, by AI systems.”