Philippines ranks 5th in data breach in Asia —cybersecurity firm

The Philippines placed fifth in the most number of data breaches in Asia since 2004, based on the Global Data Breach statistics by cybersecurity firm Surfshark released on Friday.

Globally, the Philippines ranked 17th.

According to Surfshark, a total of 124 million accounts have been breached in the Philippines, which is the second highest count in Southeast Asia following Indonesia with 144 million.

“In Asia, 52 accounts are breached per 100 people on average. However, in the Philippines, this number goes up to 106 per 100 people,” Surfshark’s lead researcher Agneska Sablovskaja said.

"Statistically speaking, an average Filipino has been affected by data breaches around once,” Sablovskaja added.

An average user email in the Philippines has been breached almost three times considering that out of the 124 million compromised internet accounts, 50 million have unique email addresses, Surfshark said.

“The Philippines has had a total of 420 million data points have been exposed since 2004. On average, each email address is leaked with three additional data points,” it added.

According to the cybersecurity provider, 70 million passwords were leaked together with Filipino accounts.

Due to this, the accounts of more than half of the breached users may be stolen that might lead to identity theft, extortion, or other cybercrimes, Surfshark said.

Globally, a total of 17 billion accounts have been breached since 2004 and approximately a third of them have unique email addresses, according to the cybersecurity company.

Surfshark provides virtual private network (VPN) service focused on developing humanized privacy and security solutions.

GMA News Online has asked the Philippine National Police-Anti-Cybercrime Group (PNP-ACG) and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) for their comments, but they have yet to respond as of posting time. —Joviland Rita/KBK, GMA Integrated News