Latin America has registered 5,000 attacks per day since the start of the pandemic in 2020, and Brazil leads the list with the highest number of leaked data in the region
Latin America has registered 5,000 attacks per day since the start of the pandemic in 2020, and Brazil leads the list with the highest number of leaked data in the region. An investigation by Surfshark revealed that in the second quarter of this year, 3.2 million Brazilian users were affected by some type of exposurean increase of 771% compared to the first quarter of 2022, that is, 459 people have their data leaked every 60 seconds.
According to a survey by Único, the first half of this year was marked by 2,161,951 identity theft attempts in all the country. Much of this stolen data is sold on the ‘deep web‘ in exchange for bitcoins and cryptocurrencies The retail and e-commerce segment, which together handled more than 2 million transactions, had 304,065 fraud attempts blocked with the use of facial biometrics. The estimate is that the avoided damage is around R$ 800 million.
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“Identity fraud occurs when a person tries to impersonate you when making any type of transaction or purchase. In the online environment, this type of scam starts with emails with links, pop-ups, links shared in groups, what we call phishing. The person enters, shares their data and the criminals proceed to carry out fraud. In the physical universe, cloning of cards, the loss, theft or theft of documents and the purchase and sale in the registry of natural persons are the most common. At least 40% of people in Brazil have experienced some form of identity fraud”, explains Carolina Moretto, Product Marketing Manager of Único.
From January to June 2022, 234,609 actions were registered in retail, 134% more than in the same period of the previous year, in which 100,196 attempts were registered. In e-commerce, the number stood at 64,456, an increase of 16% compared to the first half of 2021. Still, according to the survey, electronic commerce would have lost more than R$ 170 million this year if it were not for the use of technologies such as facial biometrics, to avoid these actions.
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“In South America, the average person has been affected by a data breach at least once. However, in Brazil, these statistics increase even more. The difference may be due to the online habits of Brazilian users or the data collection practices of various services or applications. The increase in the number of affected accounts shows that there is more to be done regarding online data protection”, says Arneska Sabloskaja, data specialist at Surfshark.
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