The phone numbers of around 500 million consumers are included in the stolen information.
They could be employed in internet fraud and scams. What is known about the WhatsApp data breach is detailed below.
Cybernews claims that more than half a billion WhatsApp users’ phone numbers have been compromised and posted online for sale. The article claims to have looked at a data sample after coming across a post on a “well-known hacking community forum” that advertised the sale of a database including 487 million members. 487 million people make up a fourth of WhatsApp’s two billion monthly active users, to give readers an idea.
THE LEAKED DATASET CONTAINS INFORMATION OF USERS FROM OVER 80 COUNTRIES
The user phone numbers that were exposed in the data breach might be exploited to defraud individuals. Among other nations, the database includes information on 44 million users from Egypt, 35 million users from Italy, 32 million users from the USA, 28 million users from Saudi Arabia, and around 6 million users from India. According to the article, “the information for sale also supposedly contains approximately 10 million Russian and more than 11 million UK citizen phone numbers.”
According to the threat actor, the dataset for the United States is being sold for $7,000, while the dataset for the United Kingdom is being offered for $2,500. Such a database is typically utilized by malicious actors for phishing attempts. The newspaper received a data sample from the threat actor after asking for it, and it verified that all the phone numbers were genuine ones belonging to active WhatsApp users.
USERS SHOULD STAY ALERT AGAINST FAKE MESSAGES OR CALLS
A Meta-owned platform has previously experienced data breaches. Prior to this, a dark web forum existed where millions of Facebook users’ personal information was being traded. The professional networking site LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft, recently had a significant data breach. Users should refrain from responding to calls, messages, or emails from strangers, especially those that contain links because doing so could lead them to a malicious website even though it is very difficult to determine whether their data has been compromised.
