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Data breaches in Nigeria in Q1 2025
- Nigeria ranks 34th globally with 96 thousand breached accounts.
- It is an 85% decrease in Q1 2025 over Q4 2024.
- 1 account was leaked in Nigeria every minute throughout 2025 so far.
- Since 2004, Nigeria has had a total of 23.2M user accounts exposed. 7.3M of them have unique email addresses, which means an average user email was breached three times.
Surfshark’s global data breach analysis shows Nigeria as the 34th most affected country in Q1 2025, with 119 thousand breached accounts. Globally, the latest data shows a 93% drop from 973.7 million to 68.3 million leaked accounts. The United States, Russia, India, Germany, and Spain were the countries most affected by breaches in Q1 2025.
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“In Q1 2025, the number of leaked accounts dropped dramatically, following the alarming surge in breaches seen in 2024, particularly in Q3 and Q4. Unlike the previous year, which saw compromised data reach record levels, Q1 2025 experienced a sharp decrease in exposed accounts,” says LuÃs Costa, Research Lead at Surfshark.
Cyberthreats keeps evolving; attackers constantly adapting their tactics
“Although the number of vulnerable accounts in all major regions decreased in Q1 2025 compared to the previous quarter, people should remain vigilant. Cyberthreats continue to evolve and attackers are constantly adapting their tactics.
“To protect personal and organizational data, it is essential to follow strong security practices, regularly update passwords, enable 2FA, and stay informed about potential risks,” adds L. Costa.
The downward trend of Q1 2025 is observed in Nigeria, where data breaches decreased by 85% compared to the previous quarter. Nigeria ranks 34th globally with 119 thousand breached accounts. Approximately 1 Nigerian user account was breached every minute in 2025 so far.
Nigeria is 3rd in Sub-Saharan Africa with 23.2M compromised user accounts
Surfshark’s analysis of data breaches since 2004 shows Nigeria is the 3rd in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 23.2M 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.
In descending order, the ten most breached countries in Q1 2025 were the US (16.9M), Russia (4.4M), India (4.2M), Germany (3.9M), Spain (2.4M), the UK (2.2M), France (2.1M), Canada (0.89M), Argentina (0.79M), and South Sudan (0.73M).
The countries with the highest breach density in Q1 2025 (number of leaked accounts per 1,000 residents) were South Sudan (61), Spain (51), the US (49), Germany (46), Slovenia (45), Israel (37), the UK (32), France (32), Russia (30), and Norway (25).
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
