Cybersecurity experts have issued a stark warning to Brits, with stats showing every person in the UK could have had their online accounts hacked multiple times. New research from Surfshark, who offer one of the best VPN deals around, has revealed that since 2004 a staggering 247.1million UK account have been breached. This means, statistically speaking, every person in the UK has had details from their accounts leaked around four times.
The study from the leading VPN provider said the UK was overall the seventh most breached country in the world during the past 18 years.
And that eight out of every 10 accounts that have been breached have also had their passwords stolen – putting the security of millions of accounts in jeopardy.
The three most common types of sensitive data stolen from UK users are email addresses, usernames and passwords.
Speaking about the study’s findings Agneska Sablovskaja, data researcher at Surfshark, said: “Statistically speaking, a single Brit has had around four instances in which they were victims of data breaches.
“Europe accounts for 30 percent of all global breaches, and while half of these happen in Russia, the UK also happens to have exceptionally high breach rates.
“Considering that most European countries have robust cybersecurity measures in place, this comes as a surprise and calls for better personal data storing and management practices.”
On a global level, the most breached country is the US followed by Russia and then China.
Despite this, the study found people in Europe are three times more likely to be a victim of a data breach than the global average.
Across the globe since 2004 a staggering 14.9billion accounts have been breached with around 5.1billion of these having unique email addresses.
This means on a global scale a single email address is breached three times on average.
If you want to check if any of your accounts have been hit with data breaches without you realising, you can simply head to the Have I Been Pwned website.
This handy tool will give you details of any data breaches you’ve fallen victim to after you enter your email address or phone number.
You’ll then be able to find out what accounts you need to and change your password to keep safe.
If you need to change your passwords for any accounts the UK Government recently gave some handy and easy-to-follow advice.
For anyone that wants help trying to create a tough to crack and memorable password GCHQ advised stringing together three random words.
This advice was issued in a recent tweet, and you can also use a mixture of lower and upper case characters as well as throwing in numbers to replace certain letters or using special characters to make your password even harder to guess.