KINGSTON, Jamaica — Jamaica recorded more than 34 million cyberattack attempts in the first six months of 2025, according to the latest Fortinet Global Threat Landscape report.

The report, released on Wednesday, said attackers are increasingly targeting sectors such as manufacturing, telecommunications, healthcare, and financial services, and are leveraging tools like FraudGPT and WormGPT to quickly generate convincing phishing emails and execute social engineering schemes.

At the same time, defenders are adopting artificial intelligence (AI) to detect threats and strengthen defences.

“Fortinet is embedding both discriminative AI for detecting novel malware and generative AI (GenAI) for summarising and prioritising alerts,” shared Derek Manky, chief security strategist at Fortinet. “In Jamaica, where skilled cybersecurity professionals are limited, these AI-driven tools can play an important role in boosting detection and response.”

Across Latin America, cyber activity is surging, with the region now accounting for 25 per cent of all malicious activity detected globally.

In Jamaica alone, FortiGuard detected four million active scans between January and June 2025—networks being probed and tested by attackers at a staggering pace of 36,000 attempts per second worldwide. These scans assist cybercriminals in identifying weak points they can exploit, often using AI-enabled tools to speed up attacks and increase their effectiveness.

Fortinet is encouraging organisations to adopt proactive strategies, including creating tailored playbooks for incident response, using deception technologies to identify unusual movement in networks and integrating real-time threat intelligence into their monitoring tools.

Training staff to recognise phishing attempts, especially AI-generated ones, along with running practice exercises to test readiness, is also key to building resilience.

“As threat actors become faster, stealthier and more resourceful, defending Jamaica’s critical infrastructure requires more than traditional security measures. It demands situational awareness, active threat hunting and the operational maturity to act on intelligence, not just collect it,” said Manky. “You don’t win by reacting. You win by preparing—strategically, systematically and ahead of the next attack.”