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Latin America’s cybercrime exposure is rising as digital adoption and criminal methods advance faster than cybersecurity skills, institutions, and infrastructure protections in many places. But the picture is not uniform collapse: a 2025 OAS–IDB assessment of 30 countries found improvement across all five areas it measured from 2020 to 2025, alongside persistent weaknesses that leave the region exposed to evolving threats.
Why is cybercrime increasing in Latin America?
The core risk is a widening gap between how quickly societies are becoming digital and how quickly their defenses are developing. More digital services and transactions create more opportunities for criminals to target individuals, businesses, government agencies, and essential services. Criminals are also using more capable methods, including AI-assisted creation of fraudulent content.
The evidence supports a conclusion of rising exposure and evolving threats, not a precise region-wide increase in reported cybercrime incidents. The 2025 OAS–IDB assessment measures national cybersecurity capacity, rather than counting all cybercrimes. It finds progress in capacity while warning that complex and changing threats remain a concern. The Inter-American Development Bank describes the challenge as protecting societies from cybercrime, state-sponsored attacks, and threats to critical infrastructure while continuing digital transformation.
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Digital growth raises the stakes
As essential services, financial activity, and public administration rely more heavily on connected systems, a successful attack can affect more than one person or organisation. A compromised account may expose personal or financial data; ransomware can disrupt an organisation’s operations; an attack on critical infrastructure can threaten services people and businesses depend on. These are related risks, but they are not interchangeable, and they call for different defenses.
Criminal methods are changing
An OAS 2024 document summarising Kaspersky’s account of the Latin American threat landscape reports increasing use of artificial intelligence to create fraudulent content intended to steal personal and financial data, payment methods, and cryptocurrency. It also identifies phishing, ransomware or data hijacking, and sextortion risks. The document points to AI as a tool for creating deceptive content; it does not establish a region-wide measurement of how much AI has increased the number or success rate of attacks.
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What does the latest assessment say about cybersecurity readiness?
The 2025 OAS–IDB study assesses 30 countries and compares cybersecurity capacity from 2020 to 2025 using the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model. It reports overall improvement across all five dimensions and a narrowing maturity gap between countries. Those findings indicate progress, but they do not mean every country has the same level of protection or that improvement has eliminated exposure.
| Capacity dimension | What it examines | Why it matters to cybercrime resilience |
|---|---|---|
| Policies and strategies | National direction and planning for cybersecurity | Clear priorities help governments organise prevention, preparedness, and response. |
| Culture and society | Public understanding and social practices related to cybersecurity | Awareness can help people recognise scams and handle personal information more carefully. |
| Education, training, and skills | Cybersecurity knowledge and workforce capability | Skilled people are needed to secure systems and respond when incidents occur. |
| Legal and regulatory frameworks | Laws and rules relevant to cybersecurity | Legal powers and reporting arrangements shape how incidents can be addressed. |
| Technologies and standards | Technology practices and the standards used to protect systems | Secure, well-maintained systems reduce weaknesses that attackers may exploit. |
The assessment also identifies persistent weaknesses in software quality, critical-infrastructure protection, cybersecurity-market development, research and innovation, and cyber-insurance adoption. These areas help explain why improved average maturity can coexist with serious operational gaps. An average improvement does not show how well a particular organisation can withstand or recover from an attack.
Which Latin American countries are most vulnerable to ransomware and scams?
The available evidence does not support a reliable country ranking for vulnerability to ransomware or scams. The OAS–IDB study covers 30 countries and reports regional capacity trends, but the findings summarised here do not provide country-by-country ransomware readiness scores or scam victimisation rates. A single fraud count is not a substitute for those measures.
The OAS Inter-American Security Observatory publishes country-level cyber-related fraud indicators. Its definition counts fraud as cyber-related when computer data or systems are integral to the crime’s modus operandi. One displayed figure is 264,016 for Brazil, attributed to the Organization of American States in 2024. That is a country indicator, not a Latin America total, and it does not by itself establish that Brazil is more vulnerable than another country: a count is not a like-for-like measure of risk without comparable reporting, population, and methodology context.
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How to make a more meaningful comparison
For a practical comparison, look at capacity and operational readiness rather than the most alarming incident count. The OAS–IDB assessment’s dimensions provide a starting point; the following questions turn them into a country or organisation review:
- Governance: Is there a national cybersecurity strategy with clear responsibilities?
- Law and reporting: Are legal powers and incident-reporting arrangements established?
- People: Are trained staff and education pathways available?
- Response: Can organisations detect, coordinate, and respond to incidents in practice?
- Critical infrastructure: Are essential services and their suppliers included in security planning?
- Technology: Are software quality and security standards treated as ongoing priorities?
- Cooperation: Do public and private organisations share relevant threat information?
- Resourcing: Is there access to research, security services, and cyber-insurance?
These questions are useful precisely because they avoid treating a country’s reported incident count as a direct measure of its underlying security. Reporting practices and capacity can differ, and incident totals alone do not describe how prepared a country is to prevent or manage an attack.
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How is AI changing cybercrime in Latin America?
The specific change reported in the OAS 2024 document is criminals’ increasing use of AI to create fraudulent content designed to steal personal and financial data, payment methods, and cryptocurrency. Convincing deceptive content can make it harder for a recipient to judge a message by appearance alone. The practical response is to verify requests through a separate, trusted channel rather than relying on how authentic a message looks.
AI is one element in a broader threat landscape, not a replacement for familiar techniques. Phishing can be used to draw people into revealing credentials or payment details; ransomware and data hijacking can interrupt operations or expose information; sextortion can exploit intimate material or threats. The OAS summary lists these risks but does not quantify their relative prevalence across countries.
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What can businesses do to protect themselves?
Businesses should prepare for both deception aimed at people and attacks aimed at systems. The measures below are practical safeguards, not a claim that any single control can prevent every incident.
Reduce the chance that a scam becomes an incident
- Train staff to pause and verify unexpected requests for money, credentials, sensitive data, or cryptocurrency transfers using a known contact method.
- Use multifactor authentication on business email, financial accounts, administrator accounts, and remote access where available.
- Limit access to sensitive systems and data to the people who need it, and remove access promptly when roles change or staff leave.
- Make it easy for employees to report suspicious messages without blame, so a possible phishing attempt can be assessed quickly.
Prepare for ransomware and data loss
- Keep operating systems, applications, and security tools updated, with a process for prioritising important fixes.
- Maintain backups of essential information and test that the organisation can restore them. Keep backup access separate from ordinary user accounts where feasible.
- Document who is responsible for isolating affected systems, contacting technical responders, communicating with customers or partners, and making recovery decisions.
- Review suppliers and service providers that can access business systems or sensitive data; a company’s exposure can include weaknesses beyond its own network.
Make the plan usable before an emergency
Write down key contacts, decision-makers, essential services, and recovery priorities. Exercise the plan with a realistic scenario—such as a compromised business email account or unavailable critical system—and record where responsibilities or recovery steps are unclear. Organisations that lack in-house capability can assess whether qualified incident-response support and cyber-risk advice are available to them. Cyber-insurance may be relevant to some organisations, but its availability and terms vary; it is not a substitute for prevention and recovery planning.
Is Latin America prepared for cyberattacks?
Preparedness is improving, but the evidence does not support a simple yes-or-no answer for the entire region. The 2025 OAS–IDB study finds progress across its five capacity dimensions and a narrowing gap between countries. It also highlights unresolved weaknesses that matter to real-world defense, including critical-infrastructure protection, software quality, skills, research, and the development of cybersecurity services and insurance.
That combination matters: stronger national capacity can improve resilience without making every institution, business, or individual safe. OAS Secretary for Multidimensional Security Iván Marques described cybersecurity as a shared responsibility and pointed to technical assistance, capacity building, and cooperation among member states. For governments and organisations alike, readiness depends on turning strategy into working skills, protections, coordination, and response capability.
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