310M data breaches in 2022 — and that's an improvement

In our ever-more connected world, there are a lot of data breaches. How much is a lot? A recent report found that data breaches plummeted in 2022 and yet, despite this, there were still hundreds of millions of incidents around the world.

Cybersecurity company Surfshark, in a recent study, said that there were about 310 million reported data breaches in 2022. This is, to be sure, a dire number. However, it represents significant improvement over 2021, which saw 959 million such breaches. Worldwide, this is a 68% decrease.

The decrease was even more pronounced when looking specifically at the U.S. Data breaches in 2022 fell by an impressive 89% compared to 2021. Before you delete your security software, however, it may be prudent to point out that this still amounted to 23.5 million data breaches total.  Most noteworthy was the January breach of BidenCash, a popular dark web carding site, which affected 2.3 million American accounts, and accounted for around 10% of total U.S. breaches in 2022. Online-to-offline shopping giant Locally's data breach in October contributed to 5% of the total user victim count as well.

While the U.S. had consistently been the most breached company over the past decade, that distinction now belongs to Russia, which accounted for over a third of all data breaches last year, while also having the highest number of breaches per 1,000 people, as much as 718. Its numbers began shooting up around the time of its invasion of Ukraine early last year. Incidentally, in the same time period, Ukraine saw 30% fewer data breaches compared to 2021: 54 victims per 1,000.

China was the second most breached country, seeing 34 million incidents last year. The breach affecting the most Chinese accounts was that of adult content site Hjedd (11 million) in June, making up around a third of total Chinese breached emails in 2022. Asia in general made up a quarter of all breaches. In Indonesia, even greater damage was done during the IndiHome breach in August, exposing as many as 12.6 million Indonesian accounts.

The ten most breached countries of 2022 in descending order were:

1. Russia
2. China
3. The U.S.
4. France
5. Indonesia
6. Brazil
7. India
8. Germany
9. Australia
10. Turkey.

The highest growth in user victims year over year was spotted in Indonesia (269%), Sri Lanka (204%), Russia (191%), Uzbekistan (73%) and China (45%).