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According to the 2022 cyber threat report from the US firm SonicWall, during 2021 alone, 623 million attacks were recorded worldwide, almost twenty attempts per second. The United States is the most affected country in the Americas, followed by Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.
Latin America continues to be the victim of cyber attacks known as ‘ransomware’ or data kidnapping. What criminals do in this mode is precisely to kidnap information from a user, be it a person, an entity or even a government, and then ask for a ransom.
Belisario Contreras, an expert in Cybersecurity and Digital Transformation, explained that “’ransomware’ in Latin America is a phenomenon that has existed for around a decade. We have seen since 2015 that many specialized cybersecurity companies are reporting that there has been an annual increase of between 150 and 200% in ‘Ransomware’ incidents in countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Costa Rica.
“It is a phenomenon, it is a reality, that governments, companies and people are facing and the important thing is to take action, change our mentality and start taking various actions in terms of investment in human resources, technology, financial investments that allow us to cope with these issues,” added Contreras.
The ‘ransomware’ uses a malicious program that prevents users from accessing their systems or files until they pay a certain amount of money and according to specialized platforms, it is estimated that criminals have obtained some 120 million dollars with this type of crime .
According to the 2022 cyber threat report from the US firm SonicWall, during 2021 alone, 623 million attacks were recorded worldwide, almost twenty attempts per second. The United States is the most affected country in the Americas, followed by Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.
“Brazil was the country in Latin America that made the most services directly exposed on the Internet available and those services were not properly configured. This is practically an invitation for criminals to permeate the environment through the server that was made available and manage to carry out an attack of ransom”, said Daniel Barbosa, specialist in Information Security.
The last country to suffer a large-scale attack of this type was Costa Rica, where on May 16 the Russian group conti affected some thirty state entities. Previously, the same organization had affected the Ministry of the Interior of Peru, revealing surveillance of public officials.
The experts explain that Latin America is a potentially profitable region and where cybersecurity is not well developed, so they ask for a greater investment in personnel and systems that guarantee greater security.
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