A record-breaking 5.9 billion accounts were affected by data breaches throughout 2021, according to data from Atlas VPN.

As part of its research, Atlas VPN retrieved and calculated the numbers of breached accounts based on multiple publicly available sources. The total count includes worldwide data breaches that took place from January 1st, 2021, to December 31st, 2021.

The biggest single breach came in February. Dubbed the Compilation of Many Breaches (COMB), the leak saw a user release 3.2bn unique cleartext email and password combinations on popular hacker forum RaidForums.

Aggregated from a variety of older leaks and breaches, including from Netflix and LinkedIn, the data had been gathered over five years.

The aggregator charged the equivalent of $2 for access. However, the breach was not well received, being condemned for being low quality and not providing new data.

COMB helped 2021 set the record for data breaches and brought the number of leaks in the first quarter of the year to 4bn. As such, the number of accounts affected by data leaks dropped 65% to 1.4bn in the second quarter of the year.

Meanwhile, the second half of the year saw significantly fewer account breaches. Overall, 357 million and 93m accounts were affected by data leaks in the third and fourth quarters, respectively.

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Other breaches that made it to the top five biggest data leaks of 2021 include LinkedIn (700m people), Facebook (533m people), Brazil’s Ministry of Health (220m people), and SocialArks (214m people).

The LinkedIn leak came in June, which saw data on 93% of LinkedIn’s entire user database offered for sale on the dark web. The leaked data includes user email addresses, full names, phone numbers, physical addresses, geolocation records, genders, personal and professional experience, and more.

However, LinkedIn noted that the dump was not a result of an actual data breach but rather a data scraping event.

Cybersecurity writer and researcher at Atlas VPN Ruta Cizinauskaite said: “Even with data breaches becoming a growing threat, it seems organisations are still not putting enough effort in protecting the personal information of their users.

“One of the first things every organisation should do is evaluate the amount of sensitive user data it collects — the less sensitive data is stored, the lesser the risk of it being leaked.”

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