The Brazilian Critical Infrastructure Threat Landscape and Implications for Healthcare Organizations

Key Judgements 

• Fragmented care between rural and urban clinical environments has led to heightened risks of violence toward health sector employees. Brazilian centralized healthcare access requires large data stores, which threat actors have often targeted.
• Nation-state actors and financially-motivated criminals pose espionage, data breach and extortion risks: Brazilian critical infrastructure organizations face a broad array of cyber threats, including sophisticated foreign state-sponsored threats, as well as growing nonstate cybercriminal (and hacktivist) campaigns, which elevate a range of monetary and operational risks, including for healthcare entities.
• Petty criminals and organized criminal groups occasionally threaten critical services: Copper cable thefts are pervasive and sporadically result in blackouts or disruption to traffic light systems, while organized criminal groups damage or prevent maintenance of water stations and telecommunication antennas in low-income areas they control, posing operational risks to healthcare service providers in these regions.
• Protest activity and labor action will likely pick up ahead of 2026 elections: Brazil’s polarized political and social environments will fuel recurring protests and strikes over the coming 18months, opening the door to sporadic violent and/or disruptive incidents.
• Terrorism risks will remain low, although isolated plots will persist: While Brazil has not recorded terrorist incidents in recent decades, police have thwarted multiple plots in recent years, highlighting underlying risks of religiously- or politically-motivated attacks.
• Increasingly frequent extreme weather events threaten to disrupt transportation and utilities: Intense droughts have become more frequent and will threaten hydroelectric power generation and water transportation, while heavy rains will result in flash floods and landslides, causing significant damage to urban and road infrastructure.

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