The number of public databases with information about Russians in the darknet decreased by 70.14% in six months. This is stated in the InfoWatch report. If in the second half of 2025 researchers found 345 such databases, then in the first half of 2026 — only 103. Before that, starting from the first six months of 2023, there were consistently between 220 and 320 of them.

Why this happened

The main reason is the “general confusion” on shadow platforms after the closure of some resources. According to researchers, the hacker community needs time to reconfigure the logistics of supplying databases to new platforms and create reliable communities around forums.

Another possible reason is data oversaturation. InfoWatch believes that spammers, fraudulent call centers, and other consumers of databases no longer require personal data sets with basic identifiers — full name and contact information — in the same quantities as before.

Analysts also admit other reasons: refusal to publish in favor of distributing databases “to one hand,” a change of goal from stealing data from Russian organizations to “network sabotage.” They also do not exclude that effective measures by Russian authorities to combat IT crimes influenced the decrease in the number of publicly available databases.

The number of records about Russians in the discovered databases decreased from 759.2 million to 258 million — a drop of 66.02%. InfoWatch explains this either by a decrease in demand or an increase in private sales. At the same time, experts call the total number of personal data records in leaked databases since 2023 “staggering” — almost 5 billion records.