Data leak. Picture: iStock
A study has revealed that South Africa has been ranked as the 36th most breached country with 100.6k leaked accounts.
This is according to cybersecurity company Surfshark’s Quarter 3 report for 2025 released on Wednesday.
Global stats
Globally, a total of 90.6 million accounts were breached, with France ranking first and accounting for 17% of all breaches from July through September, according to the report.
Germany takes second place, followed by the US, which is third, with India and Canada rounding out the top five.
AI tools
Sarunas Sereika, Senior Product Manager at Surfshark said the increase of AI tools means that even minor data breaches can now be leveraged at scale.
“Previously, exploiting leaked data required significant technical skill, but AI has lowered the barrier to entry, allowing malicious actors to rapidly analyze and weaponize even seemingly insignificant data, transforming leaked names, addresses, and preferences into highly personalized attacks.”
Analysis
In terms of different quarters of 2025, the number of global breaches is declining. In 2025 Q2, 899 accounts were being breached every minute.
In 2025 Q3, however, breach rates are 22.3% lower, with 699 accounts being leaked every 60 seconds.
“Although the numbers remain prominent, the trend is evident in South Africa too. The breach rate is 83.9% lower in Q3 2025 than it was in Q2 2025, falling from 5 to 1 breached accounts per minute,” Surfshark said.
Data breaches
Surfshark’s said its analysis of data breaches since 2004 shows that South Africa ranks second in Africa, with 43.7 million compromised user accounts.
“A total of 12.8M unique emails were breached from South Africa. 22.9M passwords were leaked together with South African accounts, putting 52% of breached users in danger of account takeover that might lead to identity theft, extortion, or other cybercrimes.
“Statistically, 68 out of 100 South African people have been affected by data breaches,” it said.
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Europe
According to the study, Europe was the most affected region by breaches in Q3 2025, followed by North America and Asia
“1 in 2.3 accounts breached in Q3 2025 originated from Europe, with 40% of these being French. North America accounts for 17% of the breaches (15.7M).
“An additional 15.6% of the accounts originated from Asia (14.1M). All other regions accounted for around 5% of the year’s total, and nearly 19% remained unknown.” Surfshark said.
Most breached
In descending order, the ten most breached countries in Q3 2025 were
- France (15.5M)
- Germany (10.5M)
- US (10.5M)
- India (10.2M)
- Canada (4.8M)
- Montenegro (3.1M)
- Russia (2.9M)
- UK (2.5M)
- Netherlands (1.2M)
- Indonesia (943.7k).
What is a data breach
Surfshark said 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.”
Data
Surfshark said the data was collected by its 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 1 million people were not included in the analysis.
