Phone numbers of nearly 500 million WhatsApp users are on sale. As reported by Cybernews, on November 16, 2022, a a threat actor has posted an ad on a hacking community forum, claiming that it is selling a 2022 database of 487 million WhatsApp user mobile numbers. The actor claimed that the database contains mobile numbers of active WhatsApp users from 84 different countries. The phone numbers belongs to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), US (32 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), Turkey (20 million), UK (11 million), Spain (11 million), Russia (10 million) and Germany (6 million).
The threat actor told Cybernews they were selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK for $2,500, and Germany for $2,000.
Upon request, the seller of WhatsApp’s database shared a sample of data with Cybernews researchers. There were 1097 UK and 817 US user numbers in the shared sample. Cybernews investigated all the numbers included in the sample, and managed to confirm that all of them are, in fact, WhatsApp users.
WhatsApp is reported to have more than two billion monthly active users globally.
Such information is mostly used by attackers for smishing and vishing attacks, so users should remain wary of any calls from unknown numbers, unsolicited calls and messages from unknown senders.
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