Data of 500 Million WhatsApp Users Leaked Online: Report

Data of around 500 million WhatsApp users leaked and put up for sale online.

WhatsApp once again lands into trouble for data security and privacy, as phone numbers over 500 million WhatsApp users have been leaked and are put up for sale online on a hacking community forum by an anonymous seller, cyber news reported.

The hacker claims that there are over 32 million records of users from the US itself. It also includes million number of users from Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million). The list also includes India.

As per the report, the dataset for sale also allegedly has nearly 10 million Russian and over 11 million UK citizens’ phone numbers.

The threat actor also told Cyber news that they are selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK – $2,500, and Germany – $2,000.

Such information is mostly used by attackers for smishing and vishing attacks, so we recommend users to remain wary of any calls from unknown numbers, unsolicited calls and messages.

Meanwhile, WhatsApp is yet to confirm the news report.

These details are frequently used for cybercrimes like smishing and vishing, both of which involve sending the user a text message and asking them to click on a link. The user is then asked to provide their credit card or other personal details.

This is not the first data leak to affect a platform operated by Meta. Last year over 500 million Facebook users’ personal information, including 6 million records from India, were allegedly leaked.

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