A new study by cybersecurity company, Surfshark has revealed a total of 82, 000 accounts representing 64percent were leaked in Nigeria, ranking the country as the 32nd most breached country from January to March 2023 (Q1’2023)
The report noted that globally, a total of 41.6M accounts were breached in Q1’2023, with Russia ranking first and amounting to a sixth of all breaches from January through March. The United States takes second place, while Taiwan appears in third place after extreme quarter-over-quarter growth, followed by France and Spain. A 49% decrease in breached users worldwide is seen compared to Q4’2022.
“Data breaches declined globally in the first quarter of 2023 if we compare it to the previous one. However, the fact that over 40 million accounts were breached in just a few months is still a cause for concern. Those whose data was compromised are at an increased risk of being targeted by cybercriminals as their personal information can be utilized for phishing attacks, fraud, identity theft, and other serious cybercrimes,” said Agneska Sablovskaja, Lead Researcher at Surfshark.
Report Key insights:
- Globally, a total of 41.6M accounts were breached at the beginning of 2023, translating into 1 account being breached every second.
- Russia ranked 1st, amounting to a sixth of all leaked accounts, followed by the U.S. (5M), Taiwan (3.9M), France (3.2M), and Spain (3.2M).
- A 49% decrease in breached users worldwide is seen compared to Q4’2022. However, some countries experienced rapid growth, such as Taiwan (21x), Saudi Arabia (19x), South Korea (13x), Czechia (9x), and Armenia (7x).
- Europe was the most affected region by breaches in Q1’2023, followed by Asia and North America. All other regions comprised less than 5% of the quarter’s total.
- Some of the biggest breaches by email count were Sberbank (Russia), with 2.9M accounts leaked, Weee! (United States) with 1.1M, and Zurich Insurance (Switzerland) with 756.7K.
Report Methodology
The data was collected by our independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email address. To determine the location of the email address, our partners’ mechanism looked into several associated parameters, such as domain names, IP addresses, locales, coordinates, currency or phone numbers. This data was then anonymized and passed on to Surfshark’s researchers to perform a statistical analysis of their findings.