Mexico, at the top of the Latin ranking of cyber chaos (and it is not an achievement that we want to brag about)
It seems that in the first half of 2025, Mexican cybercriminals (and those who visit us digitally) worked more than us on a Monday morning. According to the Fortinet Global Threat Report, our beloved country recorded the chilling figure of 40.6 million cyber attack attempts. Yes, you read correctly: millions. This places us comfortably in second place in Latin America, just behind Brazil. Basically, we are the runners-up of digital disgrace, a silver medal that no one wanted.
But the party doesn’t end here. The cybersecurity firm made it clear that today’s attackers are no longer the script kiddies of yesteryear. No. They are now professionals in evil procrastination. They no longer launch crazy campaigns, like throwing poisoned confetti to see who bites. They work with surgical precision and a level of recognition that is frightening. So much so that FortiGuard detected 17 billion active scans in Mexico between January and June. So you can visualize it in millennial terms: that is equivalent to 36 thousand attempts per second. More than your crush’s attempts to respond to your WhatsApp message.
AI: the new digital accomplice that no one invited
And what is the secret ingredient in this soup of evil? Artificial intelligence, because of course, why not? Cybercriminals now identify vulnerable services and use AI tools to automate the entire process, from intrusion to exploitation. It’s as if Alexa, but evil, is in charge of the attack. Tools like FraudGPT and WormGPT (names that sound like B-movie villains) are the new weapons of choice for designing phishing campaigns so realistic that even you would believe your “bank” sending you a text message.
These tools not only create convincing fake emails, but also map vulnerabilities and automate large-scale social engineering attacks. Basically, AI is that toxic friend that gives you all the bad ideas and helps you execute them.
But not everything is darkness in the digital universe. Fortinet also highlighted that AI is a double-edged sword. On the defensive side, they use discriminative AI to detect new malware variants and generative AI to prioritize alerts and reduce the workload of security teams. In other words, it’s a battle of robots against robots, and we are the unsuspecting pedestrians in the middle of the digital highway.
Hardest hit industries: When ransomware gets personal
If you thought this was an abstract problem, think again. The hardest hit industries in Mexico and the region are manufacturing, telecommunications, health and financial services. Manufacturing, for the second year in a row, took the unwanted crown of the most attacked industry. And criminals don’t just steal data; They are now experts in disruptive economics. They calculate the cost of a delay in the production line to adjust their extortion strategies. They changed the focus from “data hijacking” to “service hijacking“, because why keep the information if they can paralyze your entire operation and charge to return control to you?
Imagine: it’s like someone hijacks your Netflix right at the climax of the series, and asks you for a ransom to give you access back. But on an industrial scale, and with millions of pesos at stake. Nothing fun.
The report makes it clear that the combination of technology, artificial intelligence and specialized personnel will be key to confronting this growing wave of attacks. Because, spoiler alert: this isn’t going to magically get better. Trends indicate that attacks will continue to increase in volume and precision. So, if you work in one of these industries, maybe it’s time to update your software and stop using “password123” as a password.
In short, the cybersecurity landscape in Mexico is more complicated than understanding IKEA’s instructions. Between the sophistication of the attacks and the use of AI for both evil and good, we are on a digital roller coaster that we cannot get off. The only way out is to be informed, prepared and always, always, distrust that email that tells you that you won a prize that you didn’t even remember having competed for.
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