Indians exposed to cyber risk, 265 million accounts breached since 2004: Surfshark

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Data breach monitoring tool by cybersecurity and VPN company Surfshark showed that since October 2022, every minute, around nine Indian internet users have been breached. This amounts to around 738,000 affected accounts so far this quarter, the research added.

Apart from India, the research showed that the US and Russia faced the most number of cyber attacks, specifically account breaches.

While over 2.4 billion accounts were breached in the USA since 2004, Russia's figures stood at 2.2 billion. The number of breached accounts in India was at 265 million, the report added.

This data comes at a time when India has been targeted with large scale cyber attacks, including the recent ransomware attack on the All India Institute of Medical Science, the hospital-cum-medical institution in New Delhi.

Data leaks

Not just data breaches, India also figured among the top five affected countries when it came to data leaks.

Overall, since 2004, India was among the top five countries affected most by data leaks, the Surfshark research showed.

Data from the company shows that since 2004, passwords were the most leaked in India, with Surfshark recording 143 million such leaks. Apart from that 73 million names were leaked and 79 million phone numbers were leaked.

In total, along with other leaked data points such as password hash, first name, the total number of leaked data points for India stood over 1 billion, according to the data.

Meanwhile, the US and Russia figured at the top of the list of countries which leaked the most data. For instance, US leaked 9.7 billion data points and Russia leaked 3.6 billion.

"American and Russian accounts are exposed to cyber risks the most. The US ranks 1st according to the number of data points leaked per capita, where a single person has lost 29 data points on average to breaches since 2004. Russia comes second with 25 data points per person," the research added.

Overall, data breaches in Europe account for 29.7 percent of total global breaches.

"To put this into perspective, a single person from Europe has gotten their online account details leaked around 6 times since 2004. However, not all the countries are exposed to cyber risks on the same level," it added.