What are the biggest cyberattacks in Brazil and how to protect yourself

Kelvin Vasques, QA Manager, Blockbit, outlines the ever-evolving threat.

In recent years, the increasing digitalization of economic and social activities, both in Brazil and worldwide, has resulted in a significant increase in cyberattacks. In the last year alone, research has indicated an exponential growth in the number of threats suffered by companies in Brazil, which places our country as one of the most targeted by hackers and requires cybersecurity to be at the center of IT and business strategies, with high alert.

As companies adopt innovative technologies to increase productivity and achieve better results, cybercriminals also evolve, using highly sophisticated methods to carry out intrusions. Therefore, anyone who believes that implementing cybersecurity actions should be a one-off measure is wrong. In fact, it should be seen as a strategic priority to protect digital assets, being adopted constantly.

Cyberattacks vary in complexity, but they all have a common goal: to compromise data security and business continuity. Given this scenario, it is essential that companies are aware of the main types of threats that can impact their business and know how to defend against them.

1. Phishing: is one of the most used techniques to obtain sensitive business information. In this attack, cybercriminals send emails, text messages, or create websites that mimic trusted sources, such as a bank or e-commerce, to deceive victims and steal sensitive information by inducing clicks on malicious links or providing improper information, such as passwords and credit card numbers. This action can result in identity theft, financial losses, and severe compromise of corporate systems.
2. Ransomware: is a type of malware that can be accessed through links, seemingly harmful files in emails, messages and websites, or even installed remotely by cybercriminals without user action by exploiting known flaws in systems and applications. This malware infects devices and gains access to companies’ data, encrypting them and demanding millionaire ransoms to unlock them. The disruptions caused by this attack to operations are significant with extremely high financial losses.
3. Social engineering attacks: a major highlight among current threats, especially due to the increased use of AI to put them into practice, social engineering attacks use psychological manipulation techniques to induce employees to disclose confidential information or perform actions that compromise security, with hackers posing as people close to the victim. From this attack, compromise and unauthorized access to sensitive business information can occur through the infiltration of malware.
4. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service): these are attacks that seek to generate a large number of accesses and very high traffic on a company’s network or systems in order to overload them and take them offline, making them unavailable to users. From this, hackers are able to interrupt services, taking down e-commerce, for example, generating high loss of revenue, drawing attention and causing damage to the company’s reputation.
5. Software Vulnerability Exploits: These are types of attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in outdated or misconfigured software used by the company, finding gateways to access corporate systems. From this breach, hackers can gain full control over corporate applications, manipulate or steal business data and even install malware.

Although threats are constantly evolving, the cybersecurity market is increasingly updated to protect digital business assets. Even small and medium-sized businesses can now rely on complete technologies to combat threats. Among the solutions to deal with the main attacks that occurred in Brazil, the most important is the Next-Generation Firewall, which has complete security features such as Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), which offers behavioral analysis of files and the corporate network to detect and block anomalies, in addition to providing sandboxing, a technique that performs the execution of programs, potentially dangerous code or processes in isolation to protect against advanced threats. In addition, the Next-Generation Firewall also has technologies such as Web Content Filtering, Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and Data Loss Prevention (DLP), which act to detect and prevent threats and attacks in real time, blocking traffic and malicious activities on the network or in the cloud, before they cause damage.

It is worth mentioning that protecting companies against cyber-attacks requires an integrated and proactive approach. To do this, it is necessary to implement innovative solutions that are comprehensive, advanced, and constantly updated to ensure data security. Thus, it is also worth investing in an XDR (Extended Detection and Response) system for extended detection and response that uses automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to collect and correlate data from network assets in order to take actions to stop more sophisticated attacks. XDR detection logs, integrated with a security information and event management (SIEM) system, allow threats with more sophisticated intrusion, hijacking, and information theft techniques to be blocked before they have a chance to disrupt the company’s business.

Educational measures and training to empower internal users are positive actions, but the human factor will always characterize a high risk for security breaches and it is necessary to create a resilient cybersecurity environment, composed of several layers of protection. So, investing in cybersecurity technologies is not just a preventive measure, but a vital strategy for the success of organizations in a business scenario full of cyber threats. If it is possible to have an internal or outsourced security operations center (SOC) with professionals specialized in information security to monitor and respond to incidents in real time, proactive defense against cybercriminals becomes even safer and more efficient.