Tourists flocked to the Caribbean last year in numbers not seen since the pandemic began, with the Dutch Caribbean and U.S. territories like Puerto Rico surpassing even pre-pandemic visitor arrivals, officials said this month. More than 28 million people visited the region in 2022, a more than 50% jump compared with the previous year, according to the Caribbean Tourism Organization. “It’s clearly apparent that even in the face of the devastating blows delivered by the pandemic, as a region, we have responded with hope, strength and determination to prevail,” Kenneth Bryan, the organization’s chairman, said during a news conference in Barbados. The U.S. market drove more than 50% of arrivals to the region last year with 14.6 million U.S. tourists visiting — three million more than the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of European visitors nearly doubled to 5.2 million. Visits from Canadians, though, did not rebound as expected, with some [...]

In an average of more than five million vulnerability attempts per day, cyber attackers tried to compromise Costa Rican public and private computer systems at least two billion times in 2022, according to the specialized firm Fortinet. Despite this, our country is not on the podium of this study, which ranks Mexico as the most attacked country in Latin America, followed by Brazil and Colombia. Regionally, attempts to damage servers and endpoints totaled more than 360 billion last year. Among the most damaging techniques used by cybercriminals, is wiper malware, a class of malware intended to erase (wipe, hence the name) the hard drive of the computer it infects, which increased by more than 50%, while cybercriminal supply chains became more complex and sophisticated to counter defenses, the report added. Source: QCOSTARICA.

Saint Lucia will introduce an online Embarkation/Disembarkation (ED) form government officials say will enable “even more seamless” electronic processing of travelers. The new ED form is part of a government initiative to digitize Saint Lucia’s public sector services “for the continued improvement of the island’s operational competencies and simplicity of conducting business,” officials said in a statement. Travelers boarding Saint Lucia-bound flights will not be required to complete the new electronic form. However, visitors who do complete the digital form will experience “swift processing” upon arrival, said officials. Saint Lucia press