Before he built a company solving digital crimes, Wanderson Castilho was the one breaking into systems.
It started in the late ‘90s, while he was working on his master’s in physics in Brazil. Access to academic journals was clunky, and email wasn’t reliable. So Castilho took matters into his own hands.
“I used to hack my professors’ accounts just to get the articles I needed,” he told Refresh Miami. “Later I’d tell them what I did and give them their password back.”
He got curious. If it was that easy in academia, what about in the corporate world?
“I picked 10 companies and tried to extract information I wasn’t supposed to access,” he said. “Nine out of ten times, I succeeded.”
That experiment became the basis for Enetsec, the digital forensics firm Castilho founded. Today, his company investigates cybercrimes, helps organizations understand their vulnerabilities, and offers a remote platform where private investigators and cybersecurity pros can access forensic tools by the hour instead of spending tens of thousands on licensing fees.
Originally from Brazil, Castilho moved to the United States about ten years ago after being hired by a New York-based company. He now runs Enetsec from Boca Raton, where he’s based at the Research Park at Florida Atlantic University. He said the decision to build his U.S. presence there was a turning point.
“That was the best choice I could have made. I wanted to be close to research and close to new technology as it’s being developed,” said Castilho [pictured above]. “At FAU, I can bring real investigative challenges to students and work with them on solving them.”
Enetsec now has a team of 16 people across three countries, with staff in Brazil, Portugal, and the U.S. They specialize in digital forensics, penetration testing, and cybercrime investigations. Many of the cases they handle involve employees who steal company data on their way out.
“Statistically, most cybercrimes in businesses are committed by insiders,” Castilho said. “People leaving a job will often download everything they can before they go.”
In one of his most memorable cases, Castilho was asked to help resolve a domestic violence allegation. A woman claimed she had been punched by her partner while holding her phone. The man denied it. Castilho turned to the phone’s motion data, which tracks user movement in real time.
“If she fell and the phone dropped, we’d see a spike in the data,” he explained. “There was nothing. The judge saw that, and the case was dismissed.”
With the explosion of AI-generated content, Castilho is also focused on how artificial intelligence can both create problems and solve them. Deepfakes are already convincing enough to fool the average person, and soon only other AI models will be able to detect them.
“When someone creates a fake video of a public figure, it’s getting to the point where we won’t be able to tell without help from AI,” he said. “And with how much data people store on their phones – millions of files, including deleted ones – we can’t go through it manually. We need AI to scan it, find faces, search for objects, flag messages. It’s the only way.”
Now working on his fifth book, Castilho is exploring the future of artificial intelligence and how society will need to adapt.
“People are scared AI will take over. But I see it differently. Every evolution is uncomfortable at first,” he said. “We didn’t create AI, we discovered it. It mimics how our brains already work. And whatever happens next, it will push us forward.”
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