Activities of cybercriminals globally further gained momentum in the first half of 2025, with leaked accounts rising by 34 per cent from 70 million to 94 million.

The United States, France, India, Germany, and Israel were the countries most affected by breaches in Q2 2025.

In the period under review, Nigeria was not spared, though data breaches dropped by 73 per cent in Q2 compared to Q1 2025; over 152,000 accounts were still compromised in Nigeria during the first half of the year.

This was revealed by a cybersecurity firm, Surfshark, in its latest study, which showed that Nigeria had continued to battle a persistent and evolving digital security crisis.

Product Manager at Surfshark, Sarunas Sereika, said: “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.”

Sereika noted that a downward trend in breached Nigerian accounts is observed in Q2 2025, where data breaches decreased by 73 per cent compared to the previous quarter; nevertheless, the numbers remain staggering.

Indeed, Surfshark’s analysis of data breaches since 2004 showed Nigeria is the third in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 23.3 million compromised user accounts. A total of 7.3 million unique emails were breached from Nigeria. 13 million passwords were leaked together with Nigerian accounts, putting 56 per cent of breached users in danger of account takeover, which could lead to identity theft, extortion or other cybercrimes. Statistically, 10 out of 100 Nigerians have been affected by data breaches.

Further, in descending order, the 10 most breached countries in Q2 2025 were the US (42.5 million), France (11.4 million), India (1.7 million), Germany (1.3 million), Israel (1.2 million), Canada (968.600), the UK (944,000), Thailand (889,100), Brazil (639, 600), and China (578, 300).

Surfshark noted that a data breach happens when confidential and sensitive data is exposed to unauthorised 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 anonymised and passed on to Surfshark’s researchers to analyse their findings statistically. Countries with a population of less than one million people were not included in the analysis,” it stated.