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Russia remains the most breached country globally second quarter in a row War-torn Ukraine sees 183% increase in cases quarter-over-quarter, study reports
July 2022 by Surfshark
The latest study by cybersecurity company Surfshark shows that Russia is the most breached country of 2022’Q2, as determined by analyzing millions of breached accounts April through June. More than 28.78M Russian users have been breached during this period, which statistically amounts to a fifth of the country’s population. Meanwhile, Ukraine experienced a 183% rise in breached accounts QoQ, confirming that the Russian-Ukrainian cyberwarfare continues to escalate.
Surfshark’s interactive tool shows how every country in the world is affected by breaches, according to 27,000 leaked databases. The latest monthly update revealed the state of data breaches in the last quarter (Q2’2022), ranking Russia 1st in the world by leaked accounts (28.78M), followed by India (4.4M), China (3.4M), Brazil (3.2M), the US (2.3M), and South Korea (1.8M).
Russia leads by data breaches not only this quarter, but also makes up 15% of all global cases over the past 18 years. The number of breached Russian accounts rose by 136% (MoM) since the start of Ukraine’s invasion in the end of February, surpassing the usual ‘front-runner’ US and remaining first for the second consecutive quarter.
Breaches are rising worldwide, Ukraine included
Global user breaches are 2% higher this quarter than the last. In 2022’Q1, 450 accounts were being breached every minute. In 2022’Q2, however, 459 accounts were leaked every 60 seconds. This growth comes after one of the least eventful quarters in this century in terms of data breaches, 2022’Q1.
The trend in Ukraine is no different. Breach rate is 183% higher in 2022’Q2 than it was in 2022’Q1, rising from around 2 to 5 breached accounts per minute. This amounts to 687.7K breached accounts in the last three months, putting Ukraine in the 10th spot worldwide by Q2 results.
Statistically, an average Ukrainian has been affected by data breaches at least once since 2004, while every Russian has been breached around 15 times on average. While Russia’s numbers did not grow and even decreased by 33% QoQ, the scale still remains much more enormous than Ukraine’s.
Czechia and Baltic States also witness increase in leaked accounts
Besides Russia and Ukraine, Czechia and Poland are also among the Eastern European countries to make the top 20 list by Q2 results. Czechia came 13th, with 447.5K breached users and 135% rise QoQ. Poland came 19th, but had a decrease of 77%, mostly due to the exceptionally high cybercrime numbers the country showed at the start of the year.
All Baltic States have also seen striking increases in data breaches. In Lithuania, breached user count spiked by 612% QoQ, while Estonia saw 52% and Latvia 34% growth in data breaches.
Japan experiences the biggest spike in data breaches
Surfshark’s data shows that Japan had the biggest spike in breached users when comparing 2022’Q2 with 2022’Q1. The country experienced a 14th-fold rise in victims (1442%) compared to last quarter and had a striking 1.3M breached users.
China showed a 1092% jump, alongside South Korea (1013%), Brazil (770%) and Malaysia (733%). This data comes to light after a recent alleged Home Minister of Malaysia data breach, which contained information of 22.5 million Malaysians born between 1940 and 2004.
Semiannual numbers show even bigger problems for Russia
In terms of semiannual results, there were 219% more breached accounts in Russia January through June 2022 compared to the same period in 2021. To put it in perspective, due to leaks in the first half of this year, 71.7M Russian accounts were in risk of being taken over by hackers. This is because there is an extremely high number of leaked passwords in Russia, as per every 100 email addresses, 132 passwords are leaked on average.
METHODOLOGY
The Data Breach World Map was developed in partnership with independent cybersecurity researchers, who collected loads of user data from 27K breached databases that appeared online. Researchers could then sort those combinations based on specific data points, such as countries, and perform a statistical analysis of their findings. Users’ locations were identified by email or website domain name, country, city, coordinates, IP address, locale, currency or phone number.
The Data Breach World Map is updated every month with the most recent data from our independent partners. At the time of this particular study, the data analyzed was from July 1st, 2022. The numbers from January to March 2020 were compared with data aggregated through April to June 2022. Semiannual growth results were determined by comparing H1’2022 with 2022’H1. Countries with a population of less than 1M people are not included in the analysis.
