I know, right from the outset, that most of you are going to read this and then immediately move on to something else as soon as I mention that this is an article about cybersecurity and data breaches, but I’m going to write about it anyway. At the very least, when you’re agency is breached and I have to write about it, I can tell you that I told you so. Anyhow, the number of data breaches in the second quarter of 2023 was more than double the amount in the first three months of the year, according to data released by Surfshark, with nearly half of all data breaches occurring in the United States.
More than 110 million accounts were compromised in the second quarter, up from 43 million in the first three months of 2023. That works out to 855 accounts breached or compromised every minute of the second quarter. The United States accounts for 49.8 million of those breached accounts, followed by Russia with 15.3 million accounts and then Spain with 3.7 million.
In the United States, 147 accounts were breached for every 1,000 residents in the second quarter, the highest breach density of any country in the world, according to Surfshark’s data. Russia was next at 106, followed by Spain at 78. In the first quarter of 2023, the breach density for the United States was 16, nearly one-tenth of what it was in the second quarter.
“Such an alarming increase in data breaches highlights that the current data protection measures are not sufficient, and sensitive information remains at risk as cybercriminals continue to access it in ever higher numbers,” said Agneska Sablovskaja, lead researcher at Surfshark.
