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While data breaches dropped by 73% in Q2 compared to Q1 2025 (31.8k vs. 120k). More than 150 thousand accounts were still compromised in AuNigeria during the first half of the year, Surfshark’s study reports. Globally, the latest data shows a 34% increase from 70 million to 94 million leaked accounts. The United States, France, India, Germany, and Israel were the countries most affected by breaches in Q2 2025.
RELATED: Data breaches: Nigeria has witnessed a staggering 119.4k leaked accounts in Q1 2025
“Today’s digital age requires all of us to share more and more personal information to carry out daily tasks. Whether sharing your name and address for food deliveries, or phone numbers when making a booking at a barber shop, there is no guarantee that businesses are keeping crucial information safe and secure.
“In the wrong hands, this data can be used to commit identity theft, via social media, for targeted scams or sold on the dark web – where they’re traded for further illegal use.” says Sarunas Sereika, Product Manager at Surfshark.
A downward trend in breached Nigerian accounts is observed in Q2 2025, where data breaches decreased by 73% compared to the previous quarter. Nevertheless, the numbers remain staggering..
Data breach statistics over the years
Surfshark’s analysis of data breaches since 2004 shows Nigeria is the 3rd in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 23.3M compromised user accounts. A total of 7.3M unique emails were breached from Nigeria. 13M passwords were leaked together with Nigerian accounts, putting 56% of breached users in danger of account take over that might lead to identity theft, extortion or other cybercrimes. Statistically, 10 out of 100 Nigerian people has been affected by data breaches.
Nigeria’s full profile in the Global Data Breach Monitoring project can be found here: https://surfshark.com/research/data-breach-monitoring?country=ng
Which countries have been the most affected in Q2 2025?
In descending order, the ten most breached countries in Q2 2025 were the US (42.5M), France (11.4M), India (1.7M), Germany (1.3M), Israel (1.2M), Canada (968.6k), the UK (944k), Thailand (889.1k), Brazil (639.6k), and China (578.3k).
The countries with the highest breach density over Q2 2025 (number of leaked accounts per 1,000 residents): France (172), Israel (130), the US (123), Singapore (26), Canada (24), South Sudan (23), Belgium (21), Ireland (16), Switzerland (16) and Germany (15).
METHODOLOGY
A data breach happens when confidential and sensitive data gets exposed to unauthorized third parties. In this study, we treat every breached or leaked email address used to register for online services as a separate user account, which may have been leaked with additional information, such as password, phone number, IP address, zip code, and more.
The data was collected by our independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email address. This data was then anonymized and passed on to Surfshark’s researchers to analyze their findings statistically. Countries with a population of less than 1M people were not included in the analysis.
The Data Breach World Map is updated quarterly with the most recent data from our independent partners.
For the full methodology, please refer to: https://surfshark.com/research/data-breach-monitoring/methodology
