About 500 million mobile numbers owned by WhatsApp instant messaging app users were said to be sold by an unknown hacker on underground forums. According to the hacker that posted the ad, the alleged WhatsApp mobile numbers were fresh data that is not older than 2022.
The sold database contained exactly 487 million phone numbers of WhatsApp users, mostly owned by people in the US, the UK, France, Russia, Italy, Egypt, Turkey, Chile, and others. Analysis showed that these breached phone numbers are from 84 countries worldwide.
Experts are concerned about whether the phone numbers of the alleged WhatsApp users were valid.
The hackers who posted the phone number database have not mentioned how they collected them from WhatsApp users, although they said that active users of the instant messaging app owned them. Separate analysts requested samples of the data to prove its validity, to which they identified that it contained about 1,097 valid user numbers from the UK and 817 from the US.
Cybersecurity experts suspect that Meta’s permission of third-party entities to scrape user data allowed some of the biggest data leaks in history, although they were not sure if it is the case for this recent report against WhatsApp users.
According to a source, if data scraping caused the leak of millions of WhatsApp users’ mobile numbers, it violated the social media firm’s Terms of Service.
Other threat actors who could purchase the phone number database could use it for malicious activities, including phishing, fraud, or data theft. Once these malicious actors obtained the mobile numbers, numerous people’s safety and privacy would be at risk.
Social media giants, such as Meta, are expected to be more committed to protecting people’s data online, as millions of them have entrusted the platforms with their sensitive information. Since security experts cannot rely on threat actors to respect the Terms and Conditions of any platform they are targeting, it is up to the tech companies to ensure that people’s data are protected against any cybersecurity compromise.
