These 2 Countries Lead the World in Account Breaches
Over 14 billion accounts and 5 billion unique email addresses have been breached all over the world since 2004, according to data collected(Opens in a new window) by VPN provider Surfshark. Can you be counted among them? Odds are strongly a yes, and it may have happened to you more than once.
Surfshark found that since people tend to use the same login credentials for multiple accounts, a single email address has been breached three separate times, on average. The data also indicates that for every 100 people, 66 unique email addresses and 191 accounts are breached.
Leading the way in all this are the United States and Russia, combining to make up 30% of the total breaches worldwide. Both countries have over 2 billion total breaches, with America making up 15.4% of all email breaches and Russia at 14.5%.
While the US has an alarming 694 breached accounts per 100 people, Russia actually has 1,489, which gives the country the most breaches per 100 inhabitants. It also means that statistically, each Russian email account has been breached around 15 times.
The sheer number of breaches in these two countries leaves a large gap between them and other countries. China has the third-most breaches at just 986 million and only 69 breaches per 100 people. The next highest, Germany and France, don't even reach 500 million breaches.
Surfshark warns that because over 30% of the breached accounts did not contain information about a person's country of residence, the actual number of breaches is likely much higher than this study can show. So if you're worried about the safety of your online accounts, check out our tips on how you can be more secure online.
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