Hacker steal WhatsApp phone numbers of approximately 500 million customers

According to a report WhatsApp phone numbers of 487 million users have been stolen and put on sale on a “well-known” hacking community forum.

According to Cybernews, the dataset apparently contains WhatsApp user data from around 84 countries and phone numbers about 32 million users from the US, 11 million from the UK, and 10 million from Russia.

The hacker claims to have a significant number of phone numbers belonging to the citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), and Turkey (20 million).

The hacker was selling the US dataset for $7,000, the UK for $2,500, and Germany for $2,000, according to the report.

Cybernews researchers were able to get in touch with the hacker and also able to collect a sample of the data in which they found out that the shared sample contained 1,097 UK and 817 US user numbers.

Upon investigation, the researchers found that all of them were active WhatsApp users.

However, the hacker did not specify how did they obtained the data, suggesting they “used their strategy,”.

This database can be used by hackers for spamming, phishing attempts, identity theft, and other cybercriminal activities.

WhatsApp users can enable various settings within the application in order to safeguard themselves from data leaks and snoopy eyes.

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