A UK-based firm is teaming up with a Wall Street institution to fight cyber crime, now a major concern for wealth managers.

US banking and investment giant Goldman Sachs, which was targeted by hackers about seven years ago in a case that made headlines, is tackling the fight against cyber-criminals by teaming up with a UK security firm to help train its staff.

The Wall Street firm is working with Immersive Labs, which opened offices in Washington DC and New York this week, to improve the cyber skills of its employees around the world. Goldman's will initially use Immersive Labs’ browser-based platform to provide cyber security teams with purpose-built scenarios and 'gamified' lab environments to show how attacks can be identified and stopped.

Goldman Sachs said it intends to deploy its virtual learning platform among its roster of more than 8,000 developers and other staff.

A statement about the initiative did not disclose how much this will cost Goldman Sachs financially, and the bank declined to commment when contacted by this publication.

Attacks on credit risk scoring firm Equifax last year, and dozens of other high-profile hacking cases, such as those of JP Morgan in 2014 (76 million accounts affected, although it is not known if money was stolen) have pushed cyber security up the financial agenda. Cyber crime caused a total average annual cost to business, across all sectors, of $11.7 million (source: Accenture, 2017), rising to 22.7 per cent, with an average of 130 breaches per year. The total cost, while difficult to measure exactly, stretches into billions. Even official bodies such as the US Internal Revenue Service and the UK’s National Health Service have been hit.

In September 2011, hackers published the personal information of numerous employees at Goldman's, including CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Going by the name @CabinCr3w, the hackers blasted off a tweet that directed followers to the Pastebin website which listed Blankfein's age, education, recent addresses, the legal cases that he has been involved in, as well as the emails and titles of more than eightyGoldman employees. (Source: CNN, 28 September, 2011).

Goldman's partner, Immersive Labs, was created by former trainers and staff of GCHQ, the UK’s intelligence-gathering network, which is equivalent to the US National Security Agency. The firm’s services are now used by firms such as Deloitte, BAE Systems and Grant Thornton.

“There is a critical shortage of cyber professionals across the globe, which makes it difficult for organisations to find talented individuals and puts added pressures on existing cyber professionals to keep their skills sharp. Immersive Labs provides an innovative solution for training and identifying new cyber professionals and honing the skills of existing ones,” said Andy Ozment, chief information security officer and Head of tech risk at Goldman Sachs.

“The best of the best cyber talent likes to learn; however, they don't like to be taught," James Hadley, CEO and founder of Immersive Labs, said. "The cyber skills shortage is one of the largest problems facing the technology sector today and, as a result, attackers are winning. We realised that if we wanted to fix this at scale, it was not something that could be done in a classroom as it just doesn’t appeal to the people we are trying to reach. It needs to be fun, engaging and ongoing, so we took a disruptive approach to the mark.