Cybercrime in India soaring! You won't believe what our world rank is on hacking; top tips to protect yourself

tech.hindustantimes.com:

India ranks sixth in the world when it comes to highest incidents of data-breaches, according to a new research by Netherlands-based firm Surfshark. The study went back as far as 2004, when the first digital attack was recorded, to compile the data. Cybercrime in India is so prevalent that the study suggest as many as 18 out of every 100 Indians have suffered from data breaches since 2004. The breaches include personal information including phone numbers, address, email id, passwords and more. With an increasing trend of cybercrime in the nation, it has become important to know how to protect yourself from malicious hacking attempts. Read on to find out.

The Surfshark analysis mentions that between 2004 and the second quarter of 2022, a total of 14.9 billion breached accounts were reported. Explaining why the number appears so high, it said, “Most people use the same email for different accounts when registering online. That’s why a single email or account can be breached several times in different cases and some numbers may seem so high”.

According to the data, India has suffered a total of a whopping 254,890,201 data-breaches till date. The overall impact of these data-breaches has resulted in 962,693,690 leaked data points. Leaked data points indicate how many pieces of information have been stolen in all the data-breaching incidents. Among them, the most leaked data is password which has seen 139,452,180 reported incidents. Other pieces of information stolen by hackers include password hash (79,883,943), name (71,535,842) and phone number (68,665,606). The study also noted that 31.5% of total breached accounts did not contain information about the person’s country of residence, which means the study was not able to add