A global quarterly analysis conducted by cybersecurity company Surfshark has revealed global data breaches have almost doubled in Q3 2024 compared to Q2 2024.
In an email to us, Surfshark explained that globally leaked accounts have almost doubled in Q3 2024 compared to Q2 2024, as the company's analysis indicated leaked accounts spiked from 215 million to 423 million. These statistics were acquired by Surfshark's global data breach monitoring tool, which also reveals the ten most breached companies in descending order. Those stats can be found below.
Moreover, Emilija Kucinskaite, Senior Researcher at Surfshark, provided a statement to us, saying that leaked account data still remains a "significant issue" and that zooming out on the data and looking at it over 20 years reveals an even more troubling statistic - there have been 68 billion data points exposed since 2004. Of those data points, 18 billion are email addresses, and on average, each leaked email address also comes with three additional leaked data points, such as passwords or phone numbers.
"Leaked account data remains a significant issue, with breaches doubling in Q3 of 2024 compared to the previous quarter. An analysis of decades of breached data reveals a staggering 68 billion data points exposed since 2004, 18 billion of which are email addresses. On average, each email address is leaked with three additional data points, such as passwords or phone numbers. This exposure increases the risk of being targeted by cybercriminals," wrote Emilija Kucinskaite, Senior Researcher at Surfshark
As you can probably imagine, this data is extremely valuable to cybercriminals that will use to attempt scams, commit fraud, impersonation, etc.
Most breached countries in Q3 2024:
- US (93.7M)
- France (17.2M)
- Russia (16.5M)
- Germany (14.6M)
- Japan (9.7M)
- UK (8.3M)
- China (7.9M)
- Italy (7.8M)
- India (7.4M)
- Brazil (5.1M)
Highest breach density (per 1,000 residents) in Q3 2024:
- US (276)
- France (265)
- Finland (224)
- Germany (175)
- Australia (175)
- Taiwan (165)
- Italy (133)
- Singapore (127)
- UK (123)
- Russia (114)