India, Iran top third in the world in data breach

We are living in a world where breach of digital data is one of the biggest fears of people and companies. How safe is your personal data? If you're in India, you're not much. The country ranked third in the world in terms of data breaches, with a total of 86.63 million Indian users breached until November 2021, according to a report.

The breach detection mechanism used by Surfshark was used in the report. India had a 351.6 per cent increase in affected accounts compared to last year. Around 19.18 million Indian users' data was breached in 2020.

It said this year was slightly worse than the last in terms of data breach cases.

The country with the most data breaches this year was India, followed by Iran. Russia and France are the only countries in the top five as they accounted for more than half of all leaks in the year 2021, according to the report. Some of the biggest data breaches this year included COMB, Clubhouse, Facebook and Raychat.

The Middle East particularly stood out among countries that grew the most year-on-year breach-wise, as Iran, Sudan, UAE and Iraq all showed extreme spikes, according to the report.

What does the huge number of breaches mean?

Nearly 1 billion email accounts have been exposed in both 2020 and 2021, according to the report. In the year-ago period, 952.8 million accounts were breached, meaning one out of five people were affected globally, as opposed to 921.8 million breaches in the year-ago period.

It said that it won't be the case because of the fact that it could take only five years to expose the entire internet population at this rate. Accounts can be breached more than once, because data breaches are more centralized across countries. The data was collected from a 12 month period from November 2020 to November 2021. The data was analysed and compared to similar information from the year before. The study was conducted after taking information from the Surfshark Alert database, which contains all publicly available breached data sets to inform users of potential threats.

The growth in breached users is alarming due to the reputational and financial damage that can be done once a person's private data is stolen or leaked, according to Vytautas Kaziukonis, CEO of Surfshark. Criminals can use it in various illegal schemes, such as phishing emails, fake bank calls, and even identity theft. Kaziukonis said that this trend isn't going anywhere and that's an alarm over the rising instances of data breach worldwide. The internet users should take preventive measures to protect themselves from being exposed to online privacy.