A database containing phone numbers of 487 million WhatsApp users was put on sale on a hacking community forum by an unknown seller. It is not clearly specified how many Indian users are affected by the breach.
The dataset contains WhatsApp user data from 84 countries including data records of 32 million US users, around 10 million Russian users and more than 11 million UK users. Among other countries, WhatsApp users from Egypt (45 Mn), Italy (35 Mn), Saudi Arabia (29 Mn), France (20 Mn)
Another huge chunk of phone numbers belongs to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million). However, WhatsApp has denied the claims. A spokesperson said, “The claim written on Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a ‘data leak’ from WhatsApp.”
The threat actor told Cybernews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK – $2,500, and Germany – $2,000. Cybernews said it received a sample of around 2,000 numbers to verify the data breach claims and found that they belonged to WhatsApp users.
Last year, information about more than 500 million users of Facebook, another Meta-owned company, was offered online for free. In 2019, data of 419 million Facebook and 49 million Instagram users were exposed. In the same year, it had faced another breach leaving data of 267 million users exposed.
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