The 2024 Latin American Cyber Security Week (CSW), which is taking place this week in this picturesque Caribbean city of Colombia, began with two important announcements by Kaspersky: the inauguration of the company’s third legal headquarters in Latin America, in Bogotá, to serve its NOLA region, by Daniela Álvarez de Lugo, to “strengthen our presence, get closer to our customers, be able to maintain competitive prices in the market and support an operation of more than 20 employees in the country”, as the executive told this media.
During his CSW 2024 exhibition, Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and founder of the company, presented his vision on the future of cybersecurity for which he referred to the concept of Cyber Immunity, He explained the importance of having a complex protection against increasingly sophisticated attacks and explained the secret behind the innovations that Kaspersky offers to the market.
Kaspersky identified three key cyber-age problems: mass cybercrime, targeted attacks, and attacks on industry and critical infrastructure. In that sense, said that Kaspersky has developed an ecosystem that is noted for its robustness, which involves sandboxes, neural networks, honeypots, etc. with the support of a global network of threat intelligence to anticipate attacks.
Regarding targeted attacks, he highlighted Kaspersky’s proposal that offers multi-layered protection supported by a global threat intelligence system, including machine learning technologies, behavior analysis and heuristics. In fact, he made special emphasis on the company’s solutions is the best to protect against ransomware, blocking 100% of attacks.
“The combination of human expertise and AI allows Kaspersky solutions to be the most effective”.
However, the company’s CEO explained that the cyber immunity concept with Kaspersky is related to KasperskyOS (at the moment only showed journalists present at CSW 2024 a mobile version), especially focused on cybersecurity, through a layer between applications and the operating system, in order to block unauthorized access with maximum effectiveness, also preventing these attacks from spreading between components. He also highlighted his hardware solutions against attacks on industrial and critical infrastructures in partnership with other companies.
In his presentation, Claudio Martinelli explained that the cyber-immunity proposal of Kaspersky to build a safer world aims at “the return of a criminal for attacking a company is less than the money he needs to do so”. But he clarified that this is not achieved “with a silver bullet” but by offering “the right solution to the right client”.
“Cyber-security and Cyber-immunity are made by combining people, intelligence and proven and effective solutions”.
In this regard, Martinelli highlighted the success achieved with the launch last April of its Next solution for B2B customers, with which partners can bring XDR and EDR solutions to companies and capture new customers, with a cloud-focused solution to retain them. ” It was launched in April, and since that time the growth has been double digit month to month, because it brings our customers an important value and simplicity of management, and to our channel a chance to sell something beyond what the competition offers”, he said. He added that the offer of Kaspersky Next EDR Optimum enables customers who perhaps did not have conditions to have this type of solutions, “the ability to manage a very simple EDR tool, achievable for them”.
“Our expectation is to double the revenue in the next 3 or 4 years in the B2B market in Latin America, and this is based on a significant investment in terms of people and resources”.
Martinelli further claimed that other Kaspersky technologies also experienced growth in 2023, for example, in terms of industry protection, SIEM systems, Anti Targeted Attack, etc.
“All this is based on our Centers of Expertise, the fact that Kaspersky invested a lot in the state of the art in cyber protection, with our global research group GReAT, our centers of competence for industrial analysis and AI. It’s the only company that has this in the world, the only one that investigates threats originating in Latin America. We are close to the first attack and that gives us an advantage”, he emphasized.
“It is said that the cybersecurity industry is always behind the criminals; not true, 99.9% we are ahead of them because we know them by their behavior”.
And left a final message: “Cybersecurity and cyber immunity is made of the combination of three keys, intelligence, because you can’t be effective if you don’t know your enemy; training, because it’s no use having the best tool and not knowing how to use it, or having an employee click on any link; and proven and effective solutions”. And he said: “We can still two of the three in the US: training and intelligence, even for our competition because it is agnostic”.
Threat landscape in Latin America
Fabio Assolini, Director for Latin America Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team, reported that the company detected more than 1 billion malware attacks in the region over the past 12 months, at a rate of 3,170,165 per day (Among the countries with the highest growth rates are Panama, with 25%, and Uruguay, with 16%).
While this represents a drop of -3.3% that in the same period 2022/2023, warned that malware is still active and growing, for example 2.4% in phishing attacks, 28% in banking trojans, also in threats to Linux and for the first time in Latin America’s top detection, a threat to Android systems, which highlights the importance of smartphones in people’s lives as the main device for accessing the network.
Record growth in mobile attacks
The Kaspersky Threat Annual Panorama for Latin America 2024 shows that mobile attack attempts in the region totaled 3.9 million in the last twelve months, representing 7.46 blocks per minute. This figure represented an increase of 70% compared to the 2.3 million recorded in the same period between 2022 and 2023. Historically, this is also a record number of attacks and shows that mobile threats have increased.
According to data from Kaspersky, the most attacked countries in Latin America are Brazil (1.8 million blocks), Mexico (835 thousand), Ecuador (402 thousand) and Colombia (203 thousand). Ecuador is also the third country with the largest increase in this threat compared to the previous period; Chile leads the ranking of countries with the greatest increase, with 133 thousand blocks, which represented an increase of 213%; and Panama, with 20 thousand blocks, This represents an increase of 160% compared to the previous period.
The main threats detected on mobile phones and tablets are apps that show unwanted advertising. However, they also highlight platforms that offer mobile loans as collateral, but block access to the victim’s device if they do not pay monthly fees. Named SpyLoan, this threat emerged in 2023 when it ranked 5th among the most common threats targeting mobile phones, with 7% of cases. In the 2024 analysis, it rose one position and represents 12% of the blocks. This fraudulent financial model was first viralized in Mexico, but is now common in many countries in the region, such as Colombia, Peru, Chile and Brazil.
“Mobile phones play a social role in Latin America, as they are the main responsible for the digital inclusion of the population and constitute the main access to the Internet for users in the region. According to public data, 65% of the population of the region had a cell phone by the end of 2023. Mobile devices are also becoming increasingly popular as a means of payment through instant transfer apps such as PIX, Yape, Plin and other QR code methods,” said Assolini.
