Breaking News
Danger For 500 Million WhatsApp Users Over Biggest Data Sale In 84 Countries
A new report has emerged where WhatsApp is indicted to be involved in a data breach.
EKO HOT BLOG reports that nearly 500 Million WhatsApp users in about 84 countries will have their phone numbers put on sale online.
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This has been regarded as one of the biggest data breaches by the company. WhatsApp is owned by the Meta company, founded by Mark Zuckerberg.
A report by a foreign tech platform, Cybernews, said: “that an actor posted an ad on a hacking community forum, claiming that it is selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers.”
It further stressed that “The database contains mobile numbers of WhatsApp users from 84 different countries that include the US, the UK, Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia and even India.”
Based on the information, the details are mostly used by attackers for phishing attacks.
As a safety measure, WhatsApp users have been advised to refrain from calls and messages from unknown numbers.
On the different affected countries, the data set allegedly has over 32 million US user records, 45 million in Egypt, 35 million in Italy, 29 million in Saudi Arabia, 20 million in France and 20 million in Turkey, nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers.
The report from Cybernews added that the report “claims that the threat actor is selling the US dataset for $7,000 while the cost for the UK and Germany datasets is $2,500 and $2,000, respectively.
The news of the data sale, which is suspected to have been obtained by scraping, was condemned for violating WhatsApp’s Terms of Service.
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The seller did not disclose how the data was obtained but revealed that all the numbers are active users.
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