The Cayman Islands faces a real and growing national security threat from cyber attacks, according to a four-star general who headed up the United States Cyber Command.
Admiral Mike Rogers, also a former head of the US National Security Agency, warned criminal gangs and aggressive nation states, like China and North Korea, are making trillions of dollars annually through increasingly sophisticated attacks.
He said the rise in data breaches and ransomware attacks was alarming and everyone from major finance firms to ordinary people using smartphones in their daily lives is at risk.
He said Cayman, as a sophisticated financial centre, represents a viable target.
“Just because you’re on a beautiful island of the Caribbean, you’re not removed from any of this,” he told delegates at the RF Cayman Economic Outlook conference on Friday.
Speaking to the Compass after the event at the Kimpton Seafire Resort, he highlighted some of the specific types of threats the island, particularly its banking and financial services sector, could face.
He said sophisticated cyber gangs had the capacity to shut down banks and prevent the movement of money if they breached security systems. Equally, a Panama Papers-style data breach could impact the reputation of the jurisdiction or lead to the theft of information that could be sold on the dark web.
Citing the February 2024 cyber attack in which government called in the FBI and UK National Security agency, he said there was evidence that hackers were already targeting the Cayman Islands.
Specific details of that attack were never made public, though officials said the island’s sophisticated “AI-based systems” had detected the intrusion and thwarted it without any government systems being compromised.
Admiral Rogers said criminals would likely be attracted to Cayman as a “vector” to the global financial system. In that sense, government regulatory bodies that hold potentially sensitive information may represent a rich target.
While multi-national banks and funds that do business here may have large budgets to keep up with the advancing technology and swiftly shifting threat level, he accepted that small island governments like Cayman’s may lack the same resources.
He said the best thing Cayman could do was to treat cyber crime as a serous national security issue and constantly update its capabilities and understanding.
All governments should be sending a message to potential adversaries that they are investing, upgrading and constantly training cyber defence capabilities, he said in his speech.
“You want them to know you’re not just sitting here going, ‘Perhaps they won’t bother us, because we’re a small island in the Caribbean’. You don’t want to be an easy target,” he said.
Rogers highlighted criminal gangs like Lazarus in North Korea and nation states like China and Russia as representing the biggest global threat.
“I would argue criminals are so incentivised to continue to do what they’re doing when they literally are making trillions of dollars a year,” he said.
“I don’t see that dynamic changing in the near term.”
He said work-from-home policies, used by many Western companies since COVID, had increased the risk by proliferating the amount of devices that were remotely accessing company networks.
Speaking generally, he said financial services firms and governments impacted by the threat needed to work together.
“Get out and talk to others. You are not alone. We’re all trying to deal with this threat,” he added.
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