Every year, we hear something or the other about WhatsApp data breach and following this course is this news that is currently trending on various social media platforms and community forums at the end of this year, i.e. November 2022.
According to a post on a dark web forum, a hacker is claiming to sell information related to about 487 million WhatsApp users that includes their mobile numbers, respectively.
Surprisingly, the details include information related to the Meta owned firm’s consumers in 84 different countries and include 32 million users from America.
Further, leaked data-set includes 45 million users from Egypt, 35m from Italy, 29m from Saudi Arabia, 20m from France and 20m from Turkey.
Hacker has posted openly on the forum that the info related to USA users will be available for sale for $7000 and the database related to Germany and UK is available for $2,000 and $3,000 respectively.
Remember, threat actors can use such details to impersonate and launch phishing attacks.
The video and photo sharing platform has acknowledged the news as fake, as the screenshot posted in the forum doesn’t legibly prove the data hack.
NOTE- As per a report from the company in February 2022, WhatsApp has a user count of 2 billion users on a global note. It also is the world’s second non-Google app that achieved the milestone of 5 billion installs on PlayStore. And information is now out that the platform has over 11 million monthly active users who share 989 million photos and 140 million videos on a daily note and handle around 16 billion messages per day. In March 2022, Cybersecurity firm Symantec issued a warning to all online users to download WhatsApp only from legitimate platforms and stay away from applications such as WhatsApp Gold and WhatsApp Premium that were developed only to spread viruses and malware.
