Surge in leaked accounts makes more data available for hackers

The IT Army of Ukraine is a group of volunteer hackers first set up in the wake of Russia’s invasion which has since grown – Copyright AFP/File Fabrice COFFRINI

Globally, leaked personal digital accounts increased by five-fold in Q1 2024 compared to Q4 2023 (from 81 million to 435 million). This is according to the company Surfshark’s global data breach monitoring tool.

A data breach happens, according to IBM, when confidential and sensitive data gets exposed to unauthorised third parties. In the study, every breached or leaked email address used to register for online services was considered as a separate user account.

Each account may have been leaked with additional information, such as password, telephone or smartphone number, Internet protocol address, postal code, and other information that can be considered as personally identifiable. Hackers, as Forbes points out, can use compromised data for illegal activities including identity theft, financial fraud, spamming or even extortion.

Most people use the same email for different accounts when registering online. This explains why a single email or account can be breached several times in separate cases.

The findings also reveal that, globally, a total of 17.2 billion user accounts have been breached over the last 20 years, and approximately 34 percent of them have unique email addresses.

On average, each email address is leaked with around 3 additional data points. A total of 60.9 biloion data points have been exposed (17.2 billion of them have been email addresses) since 2004.

Geographically, the U.S. tops the list with 3 billion breached accounts since 2004, followed by Russia (2.4 billion), China (1.1 billion), France (522 million) and Germany (487 million). Canada and the UK are bubbling under:

• Brazil (354.2 million),
• UK (321.9 million),
• India (320.5 million),
• Italy (266.8 million),
• Canada (213.8 million).

“Surfshark’s extensive monitoring of data breach trends over the past two decades reveals an alarming digital reality: data leaks persist as an ongoing global threat. Since 2004, a staggering 17 billion user accounts have been leaked worldwide, with over 400 million occurrences recorded at the start of this year,” s Lina Survila, a spokesperson at Surfshark has told Digital Journal.

Survila makes the following recommendation: “We urge everyone to remain vigilant, create strong passwords, refrain from reusing them, and exercise caution when sharing personal information online.”