MORE THAN 500 MILLION ACTIVE WHATSAPP USERS’ NUMBERS ON SALE, SAYS REPORT

Mon 28 November 2022:

The phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users are available for purchase on the Dark web. The data from one of the largest data breaches has been posted on a hacking forum.

The data was hacked despite its encrypted messages and modern security forum. It is still unknown how the hacker obtained the data.

According to Cybernews, WhatsApp has nearly 2 billion users, with data from 487 million of them being sold in 84 countries including the United States, United Kingdom, Turkey, and France.

It also stated in its report that the leaked data is of active users.

The seller posted that the phone numbers of 32 million users from the US, 11 million from the UK, 10 million users from Russia, and six million users from India who are registered are at risk.

The report further mentions that the US dataset costs around $7,000 and the UK costs $2,500. Cybernews further claimed that they contacted the hacker to know if it was true. The hacker then provided numbers of over 1,000 users from the UK as proof.

The seller did not specify how they obtained the database, suggesting they “used their strategy” to collect the data, and assured Cybernews all the numbers in the instance belong to active WhatsApp users.

According to Cybernews they reached out to WhatsApp’s parent company, Meta, but received no immediate response.

“In this age, we all leave a sizeable digital footprint – and tech giants like Meta should take all precautions and means to safeguard that data,” head of Cybernews research team Mantas Sasnauskas said. “We should ask whether an added clause of ‘scraping or platform abuse is not permitted in the Terms and Conditions’ is enough. Threat actors don’t care about those terms, so companies should take rigorous steps to mitigate threats and prevent platform abuse from a technical standpoint.”

This is not the first time Meta-owned platform data has been compromised. A similar incident occurred last year when the data of 500 million Facebook users, including India, was leaked.

This is cause for concern because the listed phone numbers could be used for spamming, phishing, and even major criminal activities.

WhatsApp users must exercise caution. Do not respond to unknown phone numbers or text messages. This is due to the possibility of hackers obtaining information through smishing and vishing. Smishing and vishing refer to the use of fraudulent links via text or voicemail by hackers. Users may lose critical data or money if they click on these links or respond to them.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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