JPMC Speeds Up Cybersecurity Spending Timeframe

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is leaping forward to double its cybersecurity spending budget.

The move comes after the company suffered a massive data breach in June last year resulting in data theft of contact information for over 83 million individuals and small businesses.

In his first statement after the breach, the company’s CEO Jamie Dimon announced last October that the bank would double its spending budget on cybersecurity efforts in the next four or five years.

Now, the bank is shifting gears to double its budget to about $500 million by 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“Cybersecurity attacks, like the one experienced by the firm, highlight the need for continued and increased cooperation among businesses and the government,” the bank noted in a filing.

Dimon said the company needed to stay vigilant as cybersecurity issues were enduring in nature and would continue to happen over a long time. He also vowed to quickly address the loopholes that led to the cyberattack.

The breach also led the company to build up a solid security operation in Maryland with a digital security staff of over 1,000 people, which is now being increasingly run by ex-military officers, the bank’s Security Chief James Cummings told Bloomberg.

According to sources, the investigation led by the bank found that the attackers deleted or altered server logs that would have helped investigators trace the movements of the hackers inside the bank network. It was concluded that the data theft was a state-sponsored act or some group trained by a foreign government as the hackers didn’t aim to get the easily marketable data but rather lingered on the servers exploring the weaknesses — an act that wouldn’t be valuable to ordinary criminals, according to Bloomberg.

As for the last hack, in July, the U.S. authorities reportedly arrested five people that were somehow related to the cyberattack but has not provided any details on how they are linked to the data theft, WSJ reported.

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