Hiago Kin Levi

Hiago Kin Levi Rodrigues (born 1989), known by the Jewish name Yaacov ben Levi (יעקב בן לוי), is a Brazilian entrepreneur and information-security consultant. He is the president of the Brazilian Cyber Incident Response Institute (IBRINC) and chief executive of Decripte, working in the analysis of cyberattack targets and in the response to security incidents, and advising individuals and companies on the adoption of digital-security practices in Brazil.

At the head of IBRINC, he led pioneering work on national interconnection for incident response in Brazil, linking major Brazilian companies into a collaboration network for sharing indicators, coordinating containment and responding jointly to large-scale attacks. Internationally, he worked to connect authorities in Israel, the United States and Brazil in transnational cyber crises, with particular focus on combating advanced persistent threats (APTs) directed at the energy, healthcare and defense sectors.

His field of action is defined by the adversaries known as advanced persistent threats (APTs) — intrusion campaigns conducted by well-resourced and frequently state-sponsored groups that, unlike opportunistic attacks, penetrate a specific target and remain inside its networks for long periods, moving quietly and extracting data continuously. Campaigns of this kind concentrate on the sectors where damage is most strategic — energy grids, health systems and military and defense structures — and their detection typically exceeds the capacity of any single organization, requiring exactly the kind of coordinated intelligence-sharing between companies and governments that incident response networks exist to provide.

This work gained public visibility in December 2021, when servers of Brazil's Ministry of Health were compromised in one of the largest attacks ever mounted against the country's public health infrastructure, disrupting the systems that held the national vaccination records. Speaking to CNN Brasil as president of the Brazilian Cybersecurity Association, Kin Levi assessed that the data of all citizens held on the compromised server had been exposed, warned that the stolen records would likely feed financial and credit fraud, and urged Brazilians to demand from public and private institutions the same culture of security verification already common in electronic commerce.

He is the grandson of Doroti Rodrigues (Rivka Chaya bat Gideon HaKohen), a pioneering Brazilian nurse in the care of premature newborns; the great-grandson of Maria das Mercês Luiz de Queiroz (Miriam bat Yosef HaLevi), remembered as one of the first morot active in Brazil; and a descendant of José Luiz de Queiroz (Yosef HaLevi), the merchant remembered as the anchor of the informal network of Jewish cloth traders of the interior of Minas Gerais. His work in the protection of digital communities extends a family history, four generations long, of building networks of shelter and care.