Whatsapp phone 487 million user numbers were stolen and placed up for sale on a “known” hacking community forum.
This dataset contains details of your WhatsApp users in 84 countries and the phone figures from its 32 million users in the US, 11 million of it in the UK and over 10 million of its users in Russia.
Hackers claim to have a significant number of phone numbers belonging to citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million) and Turkey (20 million).
The hacker allegedly sold discs in the US for $7,000, in the UK for $2,500 and in Germany for $2,000.
Cybernews researchers were also able to contact the hackers and collect samples of their data. We found that the joint sample contained 1,097 UK and 817 US user numbers. The researchers found that all were active WhatsApp users.
However, the hackers did not specify how they obtained the data, suggesting that they “used their strategy” and that all the numbers belonged to their WhatsApp user.
This database can be used by hackers for spam, phishing attempts, identity theft and other cybercriminal activities.
WhatsApp offers several privacy settings that users can enable to protect themselves from prying eyes, such as hiding their status and profile picture.