Cyberattacks have stopped being exceptional news in Brazil and become an operational routine. The country remains one of Latin America’s favorite targets, and the victim list is not limited to banks and large corporations: manufacturers, hospitals, city governments and — increasingly — small and midsize businesses are part of the count. After all, for the criminal, the victim’s size matters less than how easy it is to get in.

That is why, in this article, we show what the Brazilian landscape looks like today, which tactics dominate the incidents we investigate and what actually reduces exposure. The reading is worthwhile for companies of any size — especially those that still treat security as a one-off project.

No one is out of range — and SMBs are more exposed

Cybercrime now operates as an industry: some develop the malware, some sell the initial access and some run the extortion. That model scales, and scale targets volume. As a result, small and midsize companies have become preferred targets — they hold valuable data, depend on digital operations and, in general, have fewer layers of defense.

The math is asymmetric. A large corporation usually survives a severe incident; for an SMB, days of halted operations plus recovery costs can end the business. Moreover, the now-mature LGPD (the Brazilian data-protection law) added another dimension: if personal data leaks, there are notification deadlines and the risk of sanctions from the ANPD, the national authority, regardless of company size.

Spending more is not the same as protecting better

Security budgets have grown year after year, but complexity has grown with them. Cloud, SaaS, hybrid work and now AI assistants have widened the exposed surface. Meanwhile, many companies accumulate overlapping tools that nobody truly operates.

In practice, the most common mistake we find is not a lack of investment — it is a lack of fundamentals: incomplete asset inventories, privileged access that is never reviewed, backups that were never tested. So, before buying the next acronym, make sure the basics are genuinely covered. That is exactly the assessment we run in Inove’s cybersecurity practice.

The tactics that dominate incidents

• Ransomware as a service (RaaS) — groups rent the malware to affiliates. Double extortion is the standard: data is encrypted and also copied, with a threat of publication. That is why backup alone no longer closes the case.
• Identity theft and session hijacking — infostealers harvest passwords, tokens and cookies. With a valid cookie, the criminal enters the cloud environment without typing a password. Identity has become the new perimeter.
• AI-boosted phishing — generative AI writes flawless lures in the company’s tone and already produces fake voice and video for approval scams. Bad grammar is no longer the alarm bell.
• Supply chain — compromising a software or service vendor reaches its entire customer base at once. Third parties must be part of the risk scope.
• Legitimate tools used against you — remote access, native scripts and infrastructure hosted on well-known clouds hide malicious traffic inside the normal. Detection must look at behavior, not just address reputation.

What actually reduces exposure

1. Phishing-resistant MFA — passkeys or FIDO2 keys on critical access; SMS codes do not withstand today’s kits.
2. Immutable, isolated and tested backup — a backup that has never been restored is not yet a backup.
3. Inventory and prioritized patching — know your assets and fix what is internet-exposed first. A well-managed infrastructure is half the defense.
4. Continuous monitoring — detecting in hours rather than weeks changes the size of the damage.
5. Trained people and a rehearsed plan — simulate the incident before it happens, including who communicates what, to whom and by which deadline.

In short, the Brazilian landscape demands treating security as a routine, not as a project with an end date. Tactics change every quarter, but the victim pattern repeats itself: weak fundamentals, improvised response. Companies that flip that equation — solid basics, active monitoring, tested plan — turn the inevitable attack into a manageable event.