Justice Federal Credit Union

9 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 4 BVM: You’re an IT expert. Can you talk about how Justice Federal deals with the issues of security and cybercrime? Robnett: “There was a time when most businesses, and specifically financial institutions, hosted everything; it was commonplace and if you were a certain size, you could manage it. Well, things have evolved mightily since then and so, we’ve taken a concerted effort to migrate many of our critical systems to the cloud – not just for security, but for resiliency, as well, and for disaster recovery to make sure that our systems are up 99.9% of the time. So, we’ve migrated a lot of our primary systems to the cloud with different vendors and employed next-generation security tools to support us.” “There is a growing emphasis on fraud – it’s always been with us, however, it has accelerated, I think, during the pandemic. Now that we may be headed toward a recession, it’s accelerated even more. So, we have to be more diligent in detecting and informing our members how we are reacting to it. Having these systems in the cloud and employing artificial intelligence and some business intelligence tools, we’re able, hopefully, to predict our members’ behavior. So, when we see things that aren’t indicative of that person, then we can try to lock down the account and contact a member to be aware that there are some fingerprints or something that appears to be a fraud. That protects the member and protects the institution, as well.” “We were also one of the first credit unions to get a stand-alone cyber insurance policy, which was something new years ago. Some of that has to do with the type of credit union that we are. It’s important. For me, it was because the insurance companies hadn’t quite figured out how important it was going to be. Well, they’re aware now because of the number of intrusions. And the complexity of the attacks has just accelerated. And most of these attacks are automated; it’s not a person at a computer trying to get in. Thousands upon thousands of cyber-attacks are happening every second with the hope that even one of them is successful, making the whole exercise worthwhile.”