Africa Cyberattack Volume Falls 22% as Hackers Target Latin America

According to the latest Dark Reading analysis, the weekly number of cyberattacks directed at African organizations dropped by 22 % over the past year, falling from roughly 5,400 incidents per week to about 4,200. The decline marks the first time since 2020 that Africa has not held the top spot for attack volume, a position it had occupied for three consecutive years, and it coincides with a surge in malicious activity elsewhere.

The pivot is most evident in Latin America, where weekly attack counts have climbed from a baseline of 2,100 to an average of 3,400, a 62 % increase. Threat intelligence firms such as Symantec and Trend Micro report that ransomware‑as‑a‑service (RaaS) groups like LockBit 3.0, Conti, and Hive are now concentrating their extortion campaigns on Brazilian, Mexican, and Colombian enterprises. Concurrently, advanced persistent threat (APT) actors including APT31 (Zirconium) and the Russian‑linked Turla group have expanded their spear‑phishing and zero‑day exploitation operations into the region, leveraging vulnerabilities such as CVE‑2023‑20198 in Cisco IOS and CVE‑2023‑20273 affecting Microsoft Exchange servers.

Analysts attribute the shift to a combination of factors: maturing cyber‑defense capabilities in South Africa and Kenya, coordinated law‑enforcement actions such as Interpol’s Operation Hyperion, and the emergence of new botnet infrastructure based on a Mirai variant that scans for poorly patched IoT devices across Latin American networks. IBM X‑Force senior threat analyst Juan Pablo Lopez notes that “the lower security maturity of many Latin American firms, coupled with a surge in RaaS offerings, makes the region an attractive target for financially motivated actors.” Palo Alto Networks’ director of threat intelligence, Sarah Chen, adds that “the increase in Cobalt Strike beacons and PowerShell‑based lateral movement indicates a professionalization of attack workflows in the region.”

Looking ahead, security teams should prioritize patch management for the identified CVEs, enforce multi‑factor authentication across all privileged accounts, and implement network segmentation to contain ransomware spread. Continuous monitoring for Cobalt Strike payloads and the deployment of behavior‑based detection rules will be critical as Latin America’s attack surface continues to expand.