The Jamaica banking sector is reportedly under pressure to roll back what has become a surfeit of hacking incidents targeting local commercial banks which is reportedly costing the banking sector around J$4 million per month.
The Jamaica Gleaner of Sunday May 5th quotes President of the Jamaica Bankers Association David Noel as saying that banks in Jamaica experience almost two cyber attacks weekly and that in one extreme month hackers succeeded in carting off $10 million.
Arising out of what is regarded in the country’s banking sector as a potentially formidable challenge to the integrity of the country’s banking sector Noel is quoted as saying that the sector is “working with law enforcement” in order to seek to maintain “customers’ privacy.” Jamaica’s central bank also reportedly sees the cybercrime targeting of commercial banks as what the Gleaner describes as “a rising problem for the banks” one response of which is likely to be “new rules to manage risk.” According to the Gleaner Report, there were sixty two “counts” of internet banking fraud in Jamaica resulting in a cumulative loss of $32.8 million. While the Gleaner says that the banks that are victims of cybercrimes “no not quantify the problem” they acknowledge that it is ‘growing” and that the intrusions and scams are becoming “increasingly sophisticated.” Tech savvy hackers are reportedly seeking to access banking platforms, forcing the banks to invest increasing sums in seeking to protect those platforms from intrusion.
Noel says that the cybercrime menace also exposes banks’ customers to risks of ‘”viruses and malware along with the use of social engineering to access customer information.”
The Bank of Jamaica has now reportedly come to see cybercrime as “an emerging category of risk for financial institutions” and says that it will be monitoring “deposit-taking institutions” for such activity to minimize their vulnerability. The Gleaner lists commercial banks, merchant banks and Building Societies, all financial institutions regulated by the Bank of Jamaica as being among the “deposit takers.”
Among what the Gleaner calls the ‘most disastrous” cyber events captured in a Bank of Jamaica report have been “the denial of service and intrusions or hacking for the introduction of malware infection.” Such cyber attacks, the newspaper says, “can impact the profitability of financial institutions.”
Jamaica law enforcement has made some degree of headway in responding to the criminal cyber challenge to the Jamaican banking sector. According to the Gleaner, the police, having tracked and apprehended two men who had hacked their way into two commercial banks in Kingston succeeded in breaking the firewalls on their laptops and obtaining sufficient evidence to press charges against them.”
Hackers, according to Jamaica’s National Security Minister Robert Montague often go undetected by stealing minute amounts (“cents”) from multiple bank accounts daily. These miniscule amounts generally go undetected by customers but could actually amount to hundreds of millions annually.
A study of the State of Cybersecurity in the Banking Sector in Latin America and the Caribbean conducted in 2018 by the Cyber Security Programme of the Inter American Committee Against Terrorism has pointed to difficulties in persuading “top management” in the banking sector to invest in digital security solutions “despite the relevance of these investments.”
