The number of data breaches in Russia surged last year and is on course to increase further in 2023, the RBC news website reported Monday, citing data from cyber-security firms.
According to Group-IB, 1.4 billion pieces of data such as names, phones, addresses and birthdays appeared online in 2022.
That marks a 42-fold increase from the 33 million pieces of data leaked the previous year.
Valery Baulin, head of Group-IB’s digital forensics lab, said the “vast majority” of the leaks appeared online for free.
“This means that the cyber-criminals’ motive wasn’t to make money but to cause reputational or economic damage to Russian businesses and their customers,” he told RBC.
Russia’s retail, industrial, transportation and energy companies reportedly saw the highest share of leaks.
InfoWatch, another Russian cyber-security firm, said more than 667 million pieces of personal data were compromised last year, up almost threefold from 2021.
The monitoring website Data Leakage & Breach Intelligence (DLBI) estimates that around 100 million unique email addresses and 110 million unique phone numbers were leaked last year.
“There will certainly be more leaks,” DLBI founder Ashot Oganesyan told RBC.
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