Top Ethical Hackers in Brazil

Today's top Brazilian ethical hackers

The current Brazilian top 3 on HackerDNA: saraivadigital (18813 XP), LuisFelipe (9201 XP) and gabrielpassos (5585 XP). Click any name to see that player's solved labs, accepted writeups, and country profile. Brazil's leaderboard moves often because the pool is deep - a single solved hard lab is enough to push a top-20 player into the top 10.

The largest leaderboard in Latin America

Brazil isn't just one of HackerDNA's top countries by user count - it's consistently the largest in Latin America by a wide margin, with more registered players than the next two LatAm countries combined. The Brazilian community spans student CTF teams, professional pentesters, bug bounty hunters, and incident responders, all of whom use HackerDNA labs to keep skills sharp between engagements. Portuguese-language writeups from Brazilian players are among the most-read on the platform.

Why Brazilian players over-index on reversing and crypto

Brazil's HackerDNA player base reflects more than a decade of local industry experience defending against - and reverse-engineering - Brazilian-origin banking malware. The Tetrade family documented by Kaspersky in 2020 (Grandoreiro, Guildma, Mekotio and Javali) is entirely Brazilian in origin and has spread from Brazil into Spain, Mexico and Chile, with Spanish police arresting 16 distribution suspects in 2021. That long-running cat-and-mouse fight has produced a generation of Brazilian researchers with unusually strong Windows internals, malware analysis and binary forensics skills - and that shows up on HackerDNA, where Brazilian players over-index on the reversing and crypto categories relative to the global average.

The CTF scene behind the leaderboard

The most internationally recognised Brazilian CTF team is Epic Leet Team (ELT), a member of the broader CTF-BR community. ELT runs the annual Pwn2Win CTF, a jeopardy-style online event aimed at advanced players, and has been the best-ranked Latin American team on CTFtime for several years. The Brazilian university circuit (USP, UNICAMP, UFPE, UFRJ, ITA, UFMG) feeds the CTF teams, which feed HackerDNA accounts.

How to climb Brazil's leaderboard

Most Brazilian top-20 accounts share a common shape: pick web exploitation as the entry category (most labs, gentlest curve), expand into reversing once binary fluency is there, and write up nearly every lab. The writeup bonus stacks on the solve XP - publishing roughly doubles your effective XP rate. Two to three solves per week plus writeups is enough to break into Brazil's top 100 within two to three months from a fresh account.