Surfshark’s study reports that Ireland’s data breaches increased by 70% in Q2 compared to Q1 2025 (87k vs. 51.1k), meaning over 100 thousand accounts were compromised in Ireland during the first half of the year. Globally, the latest data shows a 34% increase from 70 million to 94 million leaked accounts. The United States, France, India, Germany, and Israel were the countries most affected by breaches in Q2 2025.
“Today’s digital age requires all of us to share more and more personal information to carry out daily tasks. Whether sharing your name and address for food deliveries, or phone numbers when making a booking at a barber shop, there is no guarantee that businesses are keeping crucial information safe and secure. In the wrong hands, this data can be used to commit identity theft, via social media, for targeted scams or sold on the dark web – where they’re traded for further illegal use.” says Sarunas Sereika, Product Manager at Surfshark.
An upward trend in breached Irish accounts is observed in Q2 2025, where data breaches increased by 70% compared to the previous quarter. Ireland ranks 38th globally with 87 thousand breached accounts (previously 51k in Q1 2025).
Data breach statistics over the years
Surfshark’s analysis of data breaches since 2004 shows Ireland is the 4th in Northern Europe, with 27.3M compromised user accounts. A total of 6.5M unique emails were breached from Ireland. Statistically, the average Irish has been affected by data breaches around 5 times.
18.4M passwords were leaked together with Irish accounts, putting 67% of breached users in danger of account take over that might lead to identity theft, extortion or other cybercrimes.
Ireland’s full profile in the Global Data Breach Monitoring project can be found here:
Which countries have been the most affected in Q2 2025?
In descending order, the ten most breached countries in Q2 2025 were the US (42.5M), France (11.4M), India (1.7M), Germany (1.3M), Israel (1.2M), Canada (968.6k), the UK (944k), Thailand (889.1k), Brazil (639.6k), and China (578.3k).
The countries with the highest breach density over Q2 2025 (number of leaked accounts per 1,000 residents): France (172), Israel (130), the US (123), Singapore (26), Canada (24), South Sudan (23), Belgium (21), Ireland (16), Switzerland (16) and Germany (15).
METHODOLOGY
A data breach happens when confidential and sensitive data gets exposed to unauthorised third parties. In this study, we treat every breached or leaked email address used to register for online services as a separate user account, which may have been leaked with additional information, such as password, phone number, IP address, eircode, and more.
The data was collected by our independent partners from 29,000 publicly available databases and aggregated by email address. This data was then anonymised and passed on to Surfshark’s researchers to analyse their findings statistically. Countries with a population of less than 1M people were not included in the analysis.
The Data Breach World Map is updated quarterly with the most recent data from our independent partners. For the full methodology, please refer to: https://surfshark.com/research/data-breach-monitoring/methodology
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