Last year, Mexico was hit with 324 billion attempted cyberattacks, lending credence to the World Economic Forum's report that the country is the recipient of more than half of all cyber threats in Latin America.
This does not bode well for the nation projected to rank 15th in world economies this year. The imperative is clear: Mexico and the businesses it supports need to bolster cybersecurity measures to withstand the disproportionate amount of cyber incidents they may be facing in the next 12 months.
A recent report by FTI Consulting urges companies in Latin America to move beyond training checklists and focus on building a security awareness culture and incident response maturity instead. Noting that proactive employee education is often missing in mid-size organizations, it advocates bolstering security with a combination of employee security awareness training and practical measures.
Because the country has a unique threat, regulatory, and technological landscape that is still very much in development, finding the strategy that can right-fit the nation's needs is key.
AI and Lack of Regulations Put Defensive Onus on Humans
Understanding the cyberthreats plaguing your country is the first step to knowing how to prepare.
Mexico's surge in cyberattacks has largely been attributed to advances in AI. Tools such as FraudGPT, BlackmailerV3, and ElevenLabs are being used to make phishing campaigns increasingly convincing, leveraging high levels of personalization to draw users in and automation to disseminate attacks broadly. John Bambenek, principal threat hunter at data analytics company Netenrich, notes that these tools "appear to be among the first inclinations that threat actors are building generative AI features into their tooling." He states, "Before this, our discussion of the threat landscape has been theoretical."
Additionally, Mexico still lacks concrete laws governing secure technology practices. Notes Karina Galicia, Compliance Partner, Hogan Lovells, "In [Mexican] cybersecurity there are things regulated through the Data Law, but there is still nothing concrete. There are proposals, law initiatives in cybersecurity and ethical regulation of artificial intelligence and robotics, but they are still initiatives."
Cuts to the Mexican 2025 Economic Package may further leave cybersecurity and technology investments "on the back burner." Notes Victor Ruiz, founder of cyber startup SILIKN, "The budget reduction, coupled with the lack of technological system upgrades, exponentially increases the vulnerability of government agencies. This scenario creates a favorable environment for cybercriminals to operate with greater success."
Understanding the lack of external controls - coupled with the growing prevalence of external, AI-based attacks - sets the stage for the push to educate Mexico's workforce to be increasingly security-minded.
Arming Your Employee Workforce with Security Awareness
Cybersecurity training in Mexico is key to making employees aware of the challenges they are likely to face in their digital interactions. Security Awareness Training (SAT) supports a growing investment in cyber literacy that is crucial to withstanding this new stage of human-driven, largely signatureless attacks.
SAT courses equip users with the knowledge they need to recognize email-driven attacks like phishing and business email compromise (BEC), along with spoofed websites and fraudulent forms of communication. Making employees aware of imminent cyber dangers - and what they look like - could be a critical tactic for Mexican organizations, especially with AI-driven attacks that center on targeting human judgement.
Incident Preparedness and Technical Safeguards
While preventing attacks at the middle stages of the attack chain - such as malware delivery via phishing attacks - is important, it is also crucial to break the cyber kill chain as early as possible. This means coupling human-centric security training with technology-focused incident preparedness.
For example, government-targeted attacks are expected to surge by 260% during 2025 and vulnerabilities are largely to blame. Ruiz states that 7 out of 10 Mexican government institutions run on systems carrying critical vulnerabilities. He explains that during 2024 "an average of 5,500 [government] cyberattacks were registered weekly, of which 65% managed to compromise key information or systems."
Technical safeguards need to complement human preparedness in order to combat threats at scale. Proactive security measures like vulnerability management, penetration testing, and red teaming need to be performed to find threats before attackers do, while training teams to respond in a real-world situation.
Misconfigurations that can lead to additional vulnerabilities must be mitigated, and incident response solutions with AI-based detection need to be put in place to catch sophisticated exploits at the source. In lieu of mature security and data privacy compliance regulations, enhanced employee training and response readiness are even more vital to preserving Mexico's digital well-being.
Supporting Security with Fortra's Wide-Ranging Solutions
Fortra offers a wide variety of tools to bolster human and technology-centric defenses. Award-winning SAT courses move the needle towards a security awareness culture, alerting employees to the latest adversarial tactics, from phishing to BEC attacks to deepfakes, and more.
Fortra Integrity and Compliance Monitoring (formerly Tripwire) ensures that files containing sensitive information remain untampered with, while Fortra Secure Configuration Management (formerly Tripwire) ensures that misconfigurations are caught before they can be manipulated in an attack.
Given the various moving parts of the country's current cybersecurity development, a holistic human-meets-technology approach like this may be the answer to bridging Mexico's security gap in the coming year.
Discover how Fortra supports both technical and human layers of cybersecurity. Learn more.
