PH ranks 30th with most breached accounts in 2023 —cybersecurity study

The Philippines placed 30th among 163 countries with the most accounts that were breached in 2023, according to a study of cybersecurity company Surfshark released on Thursday.

Based on Surfshark’s data, the Philippines had 705,470 breached accounts in 2023, which is lower compared to the 1,369,604 record in 2022.

With this development, the Philippines improved from its 26th ranking in 2022, according to the study.

In terms of breach density or the number of leaked accounts per 1,000 residents, the ranking of the Philippines also improved from 70th place to 77th.

GMA News Online has sought comment from the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) on the matter but it has yet to provide a statement as of posting time.

A data breach occurs when confidential and sensitive data becomes exposed to unauthorized third parties, Surfshark said.

“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,” Surfshark explained.

The following countries topped the list with the most number of breached accounts:

• USA (96.7 million)
• Russia (78.4M)
• France (10.5M)
• Spain (7.8M)
• India (5.3M)
• Taiwan (4M)
• Australia (3.5M)
• Italy (3.4M)
• United Kingdom (3.3M)
• Brazil (3.3M)

Meanwhile, the countries with the lowest number of breached accounts are Guinea-Bissau, Eritrea, Burundi, Mauritania and Lesotho.

In 2022, China ranked second (34M) with the most breached online accounts but has improved to 12th place (2.6M) in 2023.

The data on breached accounts was collected by Surfshark’s independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email address, according to the cybersecurity firm.

To determine the location of the email address, these partners looked into several associated parameters, such as domain names, IP addresses, locales, coordinates, currency, or phone numbers. 

This data was then anonymized and passed on to the company’’s researchers to analyze their findings statistically, it added.

Surfshark is a cybersecurity company focused on developing humanized privacy and security solutions.—RF, GMA Integrated News