Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
Business and employment-focused social media platform, LinkedIn, recorded over 11 million data leaks in 2023, a new study has revealed from cybersecurity firm, Surfshark.
In 2023, LinkedIn had almost 11.5 million emails leaked due to the scraping of publicly available information. Out of the leaked accounts, 1.6 million were American, 1.1 million were French, and 700,000 were British.
Four Russian platforms, Chitai-gorod, Book24, Gloria Jeans, and SberSpasibo, experienced the 2nd through 5th biggest data breaches. These breaches exposed around 20 million Russian email accounts.
According to the data, 300 million user account data were leaked globally in 2023 raising more worries about the need to boost cyber defenses.
The United States ranked first among the 300 million accounts and amounted to around a third of all breaches (97 million). The breach rate in the US more than tripled compared to 2022, while the global trends show a general decrease.
Russia takes second place (79 million), while France is third (10 million), followed by Spain (8 million) and India (5 million).
Others include Taiwan (4 million), Australia (3.5 million), Italy (3.4 million), the UK (3.3 million), and Brazil (3.3 million).
The countries with the highest breach density in 2023 (number of leaked accounts per 1,000 residents): Russia (542), the US (285), Czechia (207), Taiwan (169), Spain (164), France (162), Australia (134), Panama (98), Sweden (96) and Finland (89).
Speaking on this, Ms Agneska Sablovskaja, Lead Researcher at Surfshark said despite the high number, it signified a 0ne-fifth decline from the 2022 numbers.
“As we look back on 2023, there’s a positive trend in data breaches – a 20 per cent decrease in affected accounts compared to 2022. Despite this improvement, 300 million users worldwide still experienced breaches.
“Even a single account data leak can lead to unauthorized access, risking the misuse of personal information, potential identity or financial theft. Using the same passwords across multiple accounts can compromise others, so it’s crucial to use unique and strong passwords for different online services.”
The second quarter of 2023 had the most breaches over the last year as 80 per cent of data breaches, around 134 million occurred between April to June 2023
Q3 2023 had the fewest data breaches over the last year – 31 million. In the most recent quarter (Q4’23), Panama and Israel had the biggest increase in data breaches.
LinkedIn was not the only firm open to people’s details being made available to nefarious actors. For instance, in January, Duolingo had a data breach, resulting in the leak of 2.7 million email addresses. Nearly 1 million of these emails belonged to Americans, 170,000 to South Sudanese, and 120,000 to Spaniards.
Another major data leak was on chess.com, where the scraped data of almost 1.3 million people ended up on hacker forums. Of these, 470,000 were American, 76,000 were French, 75,000 were British, and 66,000 were Indian.
In 2023, Europe’s data breaches decreased from 160 million in 2022 to 116.6 million in 2023. To put this into perspective, 1 in 3 accounts breached in 2023 originated from Europe, with 67 per cent of these being Russian. North America accounts for 34 per cent of the breaches (101.7 million) while North America’s breaches grew 193 per cent in 2023 compared to the previous year.
An additional 9 per cent of the accounts originated from Asia (26.3 million) while all other regions comprised less than 5 per cent of the years’s total, and almost 14% remain unknown.
Out of all regions, Africa saw the greatest year-over-year decrease — 88 per cent, bringing its total of 25 million leaked accounts in 2022 down to 3 million in 2023.
