Survey – Impact of Cybercrime in Latin America and the Caribbean

28/02/2013

Cybercrime in Latin America and the Caribbean is on the rise, with increasingly sophisticated threats, expensive consequences for regional economies, and huge costs for financial institutions, estimated at 93 billion dollars according to the study “Overview of Cybercrime in Latin America.”

Within this context, the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean (Lacnic) launched the first regional survey on Cybercrime (www.proyectoamparo.net) aimed at, among others, understanding the weaknesses in the use of technology and the lack of awareness of potential frauds of which Internet users can become victims. The fifteen-question survey is anonymous and takes no more than 15 minutes to complete.

The survey also seeks to know whether users have been victims of identity theft, whether they use password protection for their devices, and whether they have been contacted by strangers through their social networking profiles, as it is now extremely easy to obtain information from unsuspecting users of sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Orkut, MySpace, or Instagram.

This is the first survey of its kind conducted in the region and it is intended to update the “Overview of Cybercrime in Latin America” prepared a year and half ago by Patricia Prandini and Marcia Maggiore and funded by the AMPARO project, a Lacnic initiative. In that study, the authors cautioned on the growing significance of cybercrime in the region and estimated e-commerce fraud in Latin America at approximately 196 million dollars a year. According to that study, the region’s financial institutions lose another 93 billion dollars due to cybercriminal’s phishing activities.

According to the investigation, Brazil leads the Latin American ranking of countries with the most cyberthreats (malware, spam, phishing, bots, network attacks), followed by Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Peru, the Dominican Republic and Panama.

The full report can be downloaded at http://www.proyectoamparo.net/files/LACNIC-PanoramCiberd-VsFinal-20110701.pdf