Latin America as a Proving Ground: Cybercriminal Innovation and Escalation

This report summarizes high-impact Latin American cybercrime activity: the Conti ransomware campaign that forced a national emergency in Costa Rica in 2022 and disrupted government and healthcare services, and the persistent Grandoreiro banking trojan campaigns using tax-themed phishing, obfuscated scripts and Delphi payloads to steal credentials across hundreds to thousands of financial targets; it concludes with defensive recommendations including MFA, network segmentation, tuned phishing controls and proactive threat hunting.