Someone is reportedly selling mobile phone numbers of nearly 500 million users of the WhatsApp app.
On November 16, one user δημοσίευσε μια διαφήμιση σε ένα γνωστό hacking forum, υποστηρίζοντας ότι πουλάει μια βάση δεδομένων του 2022 με 487 millions mobile phone numbers of WhatsApp users.
The dataset reportedly contains user data from 84 countries. For example, there are telephone numbers belonging to citizens of Egypt (45 million), Italy (35 million), Saudi Arabia (29 million), France (20 million), Turkey (20 million), but also Greece ( 617.722).
The data set for sale is also said to have almost 10 million Russians, 32 million US users and over 11 million phone numbers of UK citizens.
The malicious user he told Cybernews that he is selling all of the US data for $7.000, for the UK, he is asking $2.500 and for Germany, $2.000.
Such information is mainly used by attackers for attacks smishing and vishing, so we recommend users to be careful about any calls from unknown numbers, spam calls and messages.
WhatsApp is reported to have more than two billion monthly active users worldwide.
Upon request, the database vendor shared a sample data with researchers of Cybernews. There were 1097 user numbers from the UK and 817 from the US in the sample.
Cybernews researched the numbers and was able to confirm that all of them were active users of the WhatsApp app.
