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New Delhi: According to a report, the number of Indian user accounts affected by data breaches in 2021 has quadrupled from 2020.
India had the third highest number of tampered users after the US and Iran, says 13 December report On country-wise data breach data from Netherlands-based virtual private network (VPN) provider Surfshark.
The report states that information was stolen from an estimated 86.6 million user accounts in India through “9 big data breaches in 2021, including Domino’s India And Air India cases.”
In 2020, India saw low user account thefts at 19.2 million.
When a user’s online account is compromised in a data breach – as can happen if companies do not implement adequate security measures – personal data, which includes sensitive information such as credit card numbers and physical addresses, is exposed to malicious hackers. come in contact with. Hackers can then use this information to target users to try to trick them into personally blackmailing them or clicking on malware.
A hacker who has access to your personal details can sell your data to companies that will use it to target you with unwanted commercial communications, including spam calls, SMS, emails and WhatsApp messages.
US, Middle East badly hit by data breaches
Surfshark says it collected the data through its product, Surfshark Alert. The company noticed the data breaches between November 2020 and November 2021. This was compared with the corresponding figures of the previous year.
Data analysis shows that the five countries with the most data breaches were the US, Iran, India, Russia and France. Violations in these five countries accounted for more than half of all leaks in 2021, Surfshark says.
Surfshark data for 2021 shows US-based users were the worst hit 212.4 million users were affected by data breaches compared to 174.4 million in 2020.
Iran has shown The biggest jump in breaches, compared to 1.4 million in 2020, affected 156.1 million users in 2021 – an increase of 10,842 percent.
The report noted that “the Middle East in particular is one of the countries with the highest breach-wise growth”.
Sudan had 9.2 million user accounts affected by breaches this year, compared to 214,600 in 2020. 9 million accounts were affected in the UAE in 2021, up from 1.5 million in 2020. Iraq experienced an increase of 2.5 million to 13.9 million.
“On the bright side, Indonesia has seen the best year-on-year improvement in the number of users violated. There has been a dramatic increase in the number of violated citizens in the country (84.7 million in 2020 to 4.4 million in 2021),” the report said. A decline of 95 percent has been observed.
Globally, however, this year has seen more breaches as 952.8 million accounts were breached in the first 11 months of 2021, compared to 921.8 million breaches in the same period in 2020.
Some of the biggest breaches in 2021 are linked to Facebookaudio social media platform club houseIranian messaging app Raichat, and COMB – this stands for ‘composite of multiple breaches’ and is a large database of personal information gathered from multiple breaches, Posted on a hacking forum in February,
Surfshark says that all of these data breaches mean that “About 1 billion email accounts have been exposed each year in 2020 and 2021.It is 1 in 5 internet users every year that is affected by data breaches.”
(Edited by Rohan Manoj)
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