An average of seven UK-based user accounts were compromised every minute during Q2 2025 — totaling over three million breaches in just three months.

Although global data breaches declined by 58% compared to the prior quarter, the total number of exposed accounts surged from 70 million to 94 million. The United States was hit hardest, with 42.5 million breached accounts, followed by France (11.4 million) and India (1.7 million), with Germany and Israel also among the affected nations.

When measured per 1,000 residents, France led with 172 leaked accounts, followed by Israel at 130, the US at 123, and Singapore at 26.

"From providing your name and address for food delivery to sharing your phone number when booking a haircut, there’s no assurance that companies are properly safeguarding your personal data," said Sarunas Sereika, product manager at Surfshark, which conducted the study.

"If this information falls into the wrong hands, it can fuel identity theft, enable targeted phishing scams via social media, or be sold on the dark web for further criminal exploitation."

In the UK, breach numbers dropped by 58% in the second quarter compared to the first. However, researchers emphasized that the figures remain alarmingly high. The UK ranked seventh worldwide, with 944,000 accounts exposed.

Since 2004, the UK has been Northern Europe’s most impacted country, with a cumulative total of 369.9 million compromised user accounts. A total of 79.4 million unique email addresses linked to UK users were involved in breaches — suggesting the average British individual has been affected by data leaks approximately five times.

Additionally, 239.3 million passwords were leaked alongside UK accounts, putting nearly two-thirds of affected users at risk of account takeover, which could lead to identity fraud, blackmail, or other cyber-enabled crimes.

The largest UK-related incident involved hacker Addka72424, who leaked 32,272,135 unique British email addresses on an underground forum.

Separately, 5,686,838 UK-associated emails were exposed when a Wattpad database containing 270 million records was shared freely on hacking forums. Another 2,856,737 UK accounts were compromised after researchers discovered that Gravatar's system could be exploited by bots and web crawlers for large-scale profile data harvesting.

Globally, more than 23 billion user accounts have been breached since 2004. Of these, around 7.7 billion involve unique email addresses — meaning each email has been exposed in breaches an average of three times. For every 100 people, 94 unique emails and 281 total accounts have been compromised.

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