Data of 500 million WhatsApp users might get leaked, data might go on sale

According to a report by Cybernews, an ad has been on a hacking community forum that claims to sell phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users.

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WhatsApp is probably the most used social messaging app currently across the world. However, there are very few people who are aware that the platform has been targeted by cybercriminals from time to time. According to a report by Cybernews, an ad has been on a hacking community forum that claims to sell phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users.

The seller on the hacking community forum claims to sell 487 million WhatsApp users’ mobile numbers. The data is allegedly from a database from 2022 and it includes users from as many as 84 countries. The countries include US, UK, Italy, Egypt as well as India. The seller also claims that the phone numbers of the database belong to active WhatsApp users.

Details about the data

According to the report, the seller is selling US dataset for $7000 while the UK and Germany datasets are available for $2500 and $2,000. The seller however did not specify how it obtained the data. It is expected that the data is obtained by violating the Terms of Service of WhatsApp.

The seller has revealed that around 32 million US user records are under threat. In a similar way, around 45 million users are from Egypt while 35 million are from Italy. Others include 29 million from Saudi Arabia, 20 million from France and over 11 million UK people. It is alleged that the data of around 10 million Russian people is also under threat.

It is not for the first time that the data of millions of users are under threat. In a recent attack (2021) on Facebook, the data of over 500 million users was under threat.

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