Data breaches surged 5-fold in Jan-Mar
Leaked accounts rose fivefold, reaching 435 million during the first quarter of 2024, from 81 million in the previous quarter, according to cybersecurity firm Surfshark’s Global data breach monitoring tool. The US, China and Russia topped the list of the countries most breached this year.
Since 2004, the breaches totalled 17.2 billion accounts, with around 6.5 billion having unique email addresses. The US led with 3.0 billion, followed by Russia with 2.4 billion, and China with 1.1 billion. Other heavily breached countries include France (521.6 million), Germany (486.7 million), Brazil (354.2 million), the UK (321.9 million), India (320.5 million), Italy (266.8 million), and Canada (213.8 million).
A report by Kaspersky from
February ranked India at 80th position in 2023. The ranking was based on malicious programs detected on a users’ devices or connected media, including memory cards, flash drives, phones, and external hard drives. This also includes complex installers or encrypted files.
“Since 2004, a staggering 17 billion user accounts leaked worldwide, with 400 million occurrences at the start of this year,” said Lina Survila, a Surfshark spokesperson. “We urge everyone to remain vigilant, create strong passwords, refrain from reusing them, and exercise caution when sharing personal information online.”
In Q4 2023, approximately 627 accounts were breached every minute, and in Q1 2024, breach rates are 435% higher, with 3,353 accounts affected every 60 seconds, or five out of 100 users worldwide suffered account breaches in Q1 2024, the report said. Of 17 billion leaked user accounts, 38% are unique email addresses. A total of 60.9 billion data points were exposed (17.2 billion of them were email addresses) since 2004. On an average, every email address is leaked with three additional data points. Surfshark said American and Russian accounts were leaked the most often.
Countries with the highest breach density since 2004 (the number of leaked accounts per resident) are Russia (16.8), US (9.0), South Sudan (8.1), France (8.1), Czechia (6.1), Singapore (5.8) and Germany (5.8).