India ranked 5th in the list of most breached countries with 5.3 million leaked accounts in 2023. Globally, a total of 299.8 million accounts were breached, with the U.S. ranking first and amounting to 32% of all breaches from January through December.
Russia took the second place, while France ranked third, followed by Spain and India. The breach rate in India was 56% lower in 2023 than it was in 2022, while the global trend shows an 18% decrease, an analysis of data breaches conducted by Surfshark said.
India was earlier ranked 7th in the list, in 2022, with 12.3 million accounts breached.
The U.S. jumped to 1st place after trifold yearly growth with almost 100 million breached online accounts in 2023, being previously ranked 3rd with 31M in 2022, after Russia and China.
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Europe’s data breaches decreased from 160M in 2022 to 116.6M in 2023.
North America accounts for 34% of the breaches (101.7M), breaches in the area grew 193% in 2023 compared to the previous year. An additional 9% of the accounts originated from Asia (26.3M). All other regions comprised less than 5% of the years’s total, and almost 14% remain unknown. Out of all regions, Africa saw the greatest year-over-year decrease — 88%, bringing its total of 25M leaked accounts in 2022 down to 3M in 2023.
LinkedIn recorded the biggest instance of people’s personal details being made available
LinkedIn had almost 11.5 million emails leaked due to the scraping of publicly available information. Out of the leaked accounts, 1.6M were American, 1.1M were French, and 700K were British. Four Russian platforms, Chitai-gorod, Book24, Gloria Jeans, and SberSpasibo, experienced the 2nd through 5th biggest data breaches, exposing around 20M Russian email accounts.
Other major breaches were recorded at Duolingo, resulting in the leak of 2.7M email addresses. Another major data leak was on chess.com, where the scraped data of almost 1.3M people ended up on hacker forums.
“As we look back on 2023, there’s a positive trend in data breaches – a 20% decrease in affected accounts compared to 2022. Despite this improvement, 300 million users worldwide still experienced breaches,” Agneska Sablovskaja, Lead Researcher at Surfshark said.
Data breaches are a matter of concern as they put users at risk of being targeted with social engineering and identity theft attacks. Scammers are known to use breached data to send fake emails pretending to be from legitimate organizations. These emails might contain links with computer viruses or requests to disclose even more personal information.
The analysis Surfshark is based on independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email address.
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