A threat actor is selling 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers online.
• The database includes mobile numbers of WhatsApp users from 84 different countries including US, UK, Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia and even India.
In what could be one of the biggest data breaches, phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users have been put up for sale online. According to a report in CyberNews, an actor posted an advertisement on a hacking community forum, claiming that it is selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers. The database includes mobile numbers of WhatsApp users from 84 different countries including the US, UK, Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia and even India.
The information is mostly used by attackers for phishing attacks. Hence WhatsApp users are advised to avoid calls and messages from unknown numbers.
whatsapp dataset on sale
The threat actor claims that the data set contains over 32 million US user records. Similarly, the affected users are 45 million in Egypt, 35 million in Italy, 29 million in Saudi Arabia, 20 million in France and 20 million in Turkey. The database reportedly contains the phone numbers of around 10 million Russians and over 11 million UK citizens.
The report claims that the threat actor is selling the US dataset for $7,000 (approximately ₹5,71,690). While the UK and Germany datasets cost $2,500 (approximately ₹2,04,175) and $2,000 (approximately ₹1,63,340) respectively.
The report further states that the seller's claim is purely speculative. More often, massive data sets posted online are obtained by scraping, in violation of WhatsApp's terms of service. However, the seller claims that all the numbers belong to active users of the Meta-owned platform. Although it did not specify how it obtained the database, the vendor said it "used its own tactics" to collect the data.
This is not the first time that Meta and its platform have been making headlines for a data breach. Last year, a leakster made the information of more than 500 million Facebook users available online for free. The leaked data included phone numbers and other details.
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