Cybercrime in Brazil and LATAM: the landscape every analyst should understand

A region under fire — with its own dynamics

Latin America is no longer a bystander in the threat landscape. Brazil and its neighbors concentrate a growing volume of attacks — but the point many analysts miss is that the regional threat has characteristics of its own, which global reports rarely capture in depth.

What makes the region's threat unique

• Banking trojans with a "Brazilian accent" — a lineage of financial malware born in the country, evolved over years and now exported worldwide.
• PIX fraud and Portuguese-language social engineering — scams designed for local behavior and vocabulary, hard to stop with generic filters.
• A Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking underground — forums, Telegram channels and markets where language is a barrier to entry for outside monitoring.
• Organized eCrime — Initial Access Brokers and ransomware targeting the region's companies and public bodies, often with double extortion.

From a global feed to local intelligence

Consuming only international feeds leaves gaps. An indicator that is technically correct but lacks regional context — who operates it, with what motivation, against which local sector — is just data. Intelligence is data with context, and in LATAM much of that context lives in the language and the culture.

Investigation with law enforcement

Cybercrime isn't solved by technical defense alone. Cooperation with authorities, evidence preservation with chain of custody, and legal limits (including data-protection law) are part of the job for anyone taking criminal intelligence seriously. Knowing the line between investigating and infringing is part of the craft.

Applied criminal intelligence for defense

Turning the landscape into action means prioritizing the threats that actually hit your region and sector, monitoring the local underground and contextualizing indicators — instead of reacting to an undifferentiated global stream.

The full picture

Understanding cybercrime in LATAM means understanding an ecosystem that speaks your language — literally. To map that landscape, from fraud to law-enforcement investigation, we wrote the e-book Cybercrime in Brazil and LATAM.

🌎 Download it for free: Cybercrime in Brazil and LATAM