Cybersecurity
369k SA accounts
leaked in 2025
One user account was leaked in South Africa every minute over the second quarter of 2025, according to a new study from Surfshark.
South Africa was ranked as the 27th most breached country in the world in the second quarter of 2025, according to a new study by cybersecurity company Surfshark. A total of 161.1k leaked accounts was detected, bringing the total for the year to 369.6k.
Globally, 93.6-million accounts were breached, with the United States ranking first and amounting to 45% of all breaches from April through June. France takes second place, while India is third, followed by Germany and Israel.
“The digital age requires all of us to share more and more personal information to carry out daily tasks,” says Sarunas Sereika, product manager at Surfshark. “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.”
Data breach statistics over the years
Surfshark’s analysis of data breaches since 2004 shows South Africa is 2nd in Africa, with 42.8-million compromised user accounts. A total of 12.7-million emails were breached from South Africa.
22.7-million passwords were leaked together with South African accounts, putting 53% of breached users in danger of account take over that might lead to identity theft, extortion or other cybercrimes. Statistically, 66 out of 100 South African people has been affected by data breaches.
South Africa’s full profile in the Global Data Breach Monitoring project can be found here.
Which countries have been the most affected in Q2 2025?
In descending order, the ten most breached countries in Q2 2025 were the USA (42.5-million), France (11.4-million), India (1.7-million), Germany (1.3-million), Israel (1.2-million), 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) were France (172), Israel (130), the US (123), Singapore (26), Canada (24), South Sudan (23), Belgium (21), Ireland (16), Switzerland (16) and Germany (15).
How was this measured?
Surfshark provided the following explanation of its methodology:
“A data breach happens when confidential and sensitive data gets 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 1-million 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, visit https://surfshark.com/research/data-breach-monitoring/methodology
