Kenya in Africa’s top list of most breached e-accounts

Online accounts in Kenya are among the most breached in Africa, new data shows, hitting 5.8 million transgressions during the 20 years to March 2023 and accounting for 0.03 percent of the overall global violations.

Data from Netherlands-based virtual private networks firm, Surfshark further shows that breaches in Kenya have increased over six-fold in the past year, jumping from 4,701 in the first quarter of last year to 78,663 during the three months ending March this year.

A breach occurs when an online account has been accessed without the owner’s permission. This can happen because of various reasons, including public data breaches, using weak passwords, falling to phishing or having malware unknowingly installed on your device.

Over the past decade, breaches in Kenya totalled 2.2 million with 4,035 incidents occurring per 100,000 people. The most-pronounced wave of breaches in the country was in June 2020 when the Wattpad database, a website that allows members to publish user-generated stories, was hacked while hosting over 270 million records leading to breaches of 727,218 accounts.

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The popular site had earlier been ranked the 150th most visited worldwide.

According to Surfshark’s data, South Sudan tops the continental list of countries with the most breached online accounts for the 20 years at 89.4 million followed by South Africa at 34.6 million. Others are Egypt, Nigeria, Morocco, and Algeria at 22.6 million, 19.3 million, 16 million, and 10.4 million respectively.

Tunisia tallied with Kenya at 5.8 million while Ghana and DR Congo had four million and 3.5 million account transgressions respectively.

“Although Africa’s share of global breaches is relatively low, the potential harm is significant. These breaches pose serious privacy, financial security, and national safety risks, calling attention to the urgent need for robust data protection measures,” reads the report.