Wall Street spending big to protect against hacking: report
Wall Street’s biggest companies are pumping more cash into cybersecurity, as the industry’s brass openly frets that hackers are the next major threat to the financial system.
Financial middlemen like stock exchanges, clearinghouses and payment processors spent as much as $3,600 per full-time employee on cybersecurity last year — the most per capita across Wall Street, according to a new report by Deloitte.
Banks — which tend to have more employees — spent much less across their workforce, about $2,000 a head, according to the study.
Across the industry, firms on average spent about $2,300 per capita, according to the report, which surveyed chief information security officers.
Deloitte didn’t have comparable data from previous years, but Wall Street chiefs warned last month that their biggest concern is a large-scale data breach that could expose customers’ personal information.
“Cyber risk is probably the biggest risk the financial system faces,” JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said at an April 10 hearing before the House Financial Services Committee.
Dimon has a right to worry: His bank got hacked in 2014, exposing the data of 83 million people, although no Social Security numbers or financial information was exposed.
Spending big, though, is no guarantee of safety, said Oren Falkowitz, CEO of Area 1 Security.
“This is one of the great frustrations that executives I speak with have,” Falkowitz told The Post.
“They just don’t’ feel confident that money they’re putting money into solutions isn’t turning into anything meaningful.”
Falkowitz then pointed at Dimon, who boasted in the bank’s annual letter that JPMorgan was spending $600 million a year on cybersecurity.
“Spending half a billion dollar on it really isn’t a good solution either,” Falkowitz, who charges clients based on the number of attacks he thwarts, added.
A JPM spokeswoman declined to comment.
Gloss