WhatsApp data leak: Nearly 500 million phone numbers up for sale on hacking community forum

• Meta has often been criticized for letting third parties scrape user data
• The leak has reportedly affected as many as 80 countries
• Its malicious uses include harvesting email addresses and exposing sensitive information

WhatsApp, which is considered fairly safe with its end-to-end encryption, seems to be in trouble again for data and privacy. A report from Cybernews claims that the data of around 500 million WhatsApp users has been leaked online and put up for sale on a hacking community forum by an anonymous seller.

The report claims that it investigated several data samples, which revealed the leak is true. WhatsApp has more than two billion users. According to the Cybernews, an actor has posted an ad to sell a list of WhatsApp data from 84 countries.  It seems that Meta hasn’t learned from its 533 million users’ data leak this year.

In the listing, the anonymous seller is putting on sale WhatsApp mobile numbers of 487 million users. Out of them, 32 million are from the US. The dataset also has 45 million phone numbers from Egypt, 35 million from Italy, and 11 million from the UK. One can buy the US dataset for $7,000, while the UK dataset costs $2,500, according to the Cybernews report.

Web scrapping? Not clear, how seller obtained the data 

It is, however, not clear how the seller obtained the data. The report suggests that it might not be WhatsApp’s fault and that the hacker could have done that using a process known as “scraping.”  They reportedly obtained the database using their own strategy. It could also be scraping through which the seller obtained the database.  Meta has often been criticized for letting third parties scrape user data. Data scraping or web scraping is a process of extracting information from a website into spreadsheets or files. Data scraping tools are used for various purposes. Its malicious uses include harvesting email addresses and exposing sensitive information. Experts say in this case, the data can be used for marketing purposes, phishing, impersonation, and fraud.

WhatsApp denies data leak

In response to Cybernews’ report, WhatsApp said, “The claim written on Cybernews is based on unsubstantiated screenshots. There is no evidence of a ‘data leak’ from WhatsApp.” “The purported list is a set of phone numbers and not WhatsApp user information,” the company added. However, Cybernews has confirmed that the listed numbers belong to WhatsApp profiles.

Facebook users data leaked last year

Last year, the personal information of 533 million Facebook users emerged on a hacking website. The leaked information included users’ email addresses and phone numbers. Threat actors used data scraping to obtain the database then.

– INDIA NEWS STREAM