International. A study revealed that Colombia was the sixth country with the most breaches in the third quarter of 2023, with 780,000 accounts leaked, representing a 93% increase over the previous quarter.
Surfshark's analysis of data breaches also shows that around 6 user accounts were leaked every minute in Colombia during the third quarter of the year.
Globally, a total of 31.5 million accounts were breached, with the United States taking the top spot and accounting for 26% of all breaches from July to September.
In descending order, the ten countries with the highest incidence in the third quarter of 2023 were the United States, Russia, France, China, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Malaysia, the United Kingdom, and India. Europe was the region most affected by data breaches, followed by North America and Asia.
"The third quarter of 2023 shows an overall decrease in the number of data breaches. However, every minute, more than 240 online accounts were compromised worldwide, exposing sensitive information to malicious actors," said Agneska Sablovskaja, principal investigator at Surfshark. "We recommend a vigilant approach, keeping accounts only on actively used platforms and implementing two-factor authentication to improve security."
Methodology
Surfshark's partners collected the data from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated it by email address. To determine the location of the email address, the partners analyzed various parameters, such as domain names, IP addresses, locations, coordinates, currency, or phone numbers. This data was then anonymized and passed on to Surfshark researchers to analyze their findings statistically.
The global data breach map is updated monthly. Figures from April to June 2023 were compared to aggregate data from July to September 2023. Countries with a population of less than 1 million people were not included in the analysis, which can be found online here.
