WhatsApp Data Breach, around 500 million phone numbers on sale. The Phone numbers of over 500 million WhatsApp users were being sold online. And this could be one of the largest data breaches. According to Cybernews, advertised on a hacker community site. The seller was offering a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp subscriber mobile numbers.
The database contains mobile phone numbers from 84 different nations. That includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Egypt, Italy, Saudi Arabia, and even India.
WhatsApp Data Breach 2022
Attackers mostly use the information for phishing attempts. As a result, WhatsApp users should avoid receiving calls and messages from unknown numbers.
The data set has over 32 million US user records. And the impacted 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 allegedly has nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers.
According to the research, the threat actor is selling the US dataset for $7,000 (approx. $5,71,690). While the UK and Germany datasets cost $2,500 (about $2,04,175) and $2,000 (approximately $1,63,340), respectively.
According to the article, the seller’s claim is totally hypothetical. However, the seller claims that all of the numbers belong to active Meta-owned platform users. Although it was not specified how he obtained the database. The seller stated that they “collected the data using their strategy.”
