…Russia, US, Taiwan among top 10
Nigeria has been ranked the 32nd most breached country in the world in the first three months of 2023, indicating a 46-percent breach rate higher than in fourth-quarter 2022, according to the latest study by cybersecurity company Surfshark.
Surfshark’s analysis of data breaches from January to March 2023 (Q1’2023) indicates that Nigeria has 82,000 leaked accounts in the quarter, up from its 41st place with around 50,000 leaked accounts in Q4’2022.
Globally, a total of 41.6m accounts were breached in Q1’2023, with Russia, the US, Taiwan, France, Spain, India, Czechia, South Korea, and Italy as the 10 most breached countries in the quarter.
Global data from Surfshark’s data breach statistics update (Q1’2023) shows that Russia ranks first with 6.6m leaked accounts, amounting to a sixth of all breaches from January through March. The United States comes in second with 5m leaks, while Taiwan (3.9m) appears in third place after extreme quarter-over-quarter growth, followed by France (3.2m), and Spain (3.2m). Taiwan had only placed 26th in Q4’2022’ with 191,000 breached users.
Globally, data breaches declined, dropping to one user account leaked every second in Q1’2023.
“According to Surfshark’s study, data breaches declined globally in the first quarter of 2023 if we compare it to the previous one,” said Agneska Sablovskaja, Lead Researcher at Surfshark.
“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,” Sablovskaja said.
By region, Europe was the most affected in Q1’2023, followed by Asia and North America. Europe was also the only region with a significant quarter-over-quarter increase in its statistics on data breaches. The number nearly doubled, growing from 9.9m in Q4’2022 to 17.5m in Q1’2023.
“To put this into perspective, 2 out of 5 accounts breached in Q1’2023 were of European origin, with 38 percent of these being Russian. Within the region, the biggest quarter-over-quarter spikes in data breaches were recorded in Czechia (almost 9x), Armenia (around 6x), and Switzerland (6x),” Surfshark said in a press release.
Asia was the second-most vulnerable region, accounting for around a fourth of the quarter’s breaches (10.6m). The three countries that saw the highest quarter-over-quarter increase overall were all Asian — Taiwan and Saudi Arabia both had around 20 times more leaked accounts in Q1’2023 than in Q4’2022, while South Korea saw its number increase 12 times.
An additional 13 percent of the accounts were North American (5.3m). All other regions comprised less than 5 percent of the quarter’s total.
Out of all regions, Africa saw the greatest quarter-over-quarter decrease — a whopping 33 times, bringing its total of 18.6m leaked accounts in Q4’2022 down to 557,600 in Q1’2023, Surfshark said.
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 756,700.
The highest growth in user victims was spotted in Taiwan (21x), Saudi Arabia (19x), South Korea (12x), Czechia (9x), and Armenia (7x).
On methodology used for the study, Surfshark said the data was collected by its independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email address. To determine the location of the email address, it said its 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.
